It’s been about a year and a half since The Ringer launched this Streaming Guide, and already so much has changed. In August of 2022, Netflix was losing ground to its competitors: HBO Max had proved to be a robust home for prestige television; Disney+ had come out of the gates with a bang off the strength of its Marvel and Star Wars properties; Prime Video was on the verge of unveiling a billion-dollar answer to Game of Thrones; Apple TV+ was making surprising inroads despite its relatively humble library. But if that time in the Streaming Wars was defined by rampant expansion, we have now entered a period of consolidation and purse-string tightening. With investors now prioritizing profitability over growth, and following a tumultuous 2023 in which there were multiple monthslong Hollywood work stoppages, the streaming industry has become much more treacherous for corporations to navigate. There are only a couple of haves and plenty of have-nots. 

HBO Max doesn’t even exist anymore—its parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery, merged its subsidiaries to create Max, a service that showcases The Sopranos alongside Dr. Pimple Popper (and often jettisons popular series at a moment’s notice for tax write-off reasons, but that’s a whole other story). Amazon’s bet on The Rings of Power (and other expensive gambits like Citadel) flopped given its cost. Disney+ is in a free fall as general interest in superhero IP wanes, and a permanent merging with its sister service, Hulu, seems all but inevitable. Paramount+ (With Showtime) has failed to make a true dent in the market, but guess what! Apparently, there may soon come a time when Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount are one and the same. Meanwhile, amid all of this backtracking and hurried corporate maneuvering, there’s Netflix. If the past 18 months have proved anything, it’s that the cracks Netflix was starting to show were temporary, and that it’s the only company built to survive the Streaming Wars. Netflix has such an outsized advantage in subscriber numbers, and in the learned behavior of those subscribers, that it can turn Suits—a show that went off the air in 2019, and that was already streaming on Peacock!—into the show of the summer. It matters less what is on Netflix than that it’s on Netflix, a truth that even Netflix’s competitors have begun to accept: After years of studios snatching back IP for their own services, those same studios are now licensing to Netflix again, since it’s more or less the only platform where a show can find a considerable audience. If there were a white flag in the Streaming Wars, everyone would be waving it right now. And after years of disruption and chaos, we seem primed to return to some form of the cable model that was disrupted in the first place. The future is Netflix—and a whole bunch of bundles. 

But until that brave new world materializes, there will still be fluctuations between these competing streaming services. There will still be the all-important question of which services are worth paying for, especially as each one institutes ad tiers and steep price hikes so you can avoid watching commercials. (I told you cable TV was coming back!) And so we at The Ringer will continue to explain what the Streaming Wars mean for you, the viewer. As we’ve done since August 2022, every week, we’ll use a proprietary formula to determine how the biggest players in the Streaming Wars stack up against one another—and more importantly, which ones are worth your hard-earned cash. The Ringer’s Streaming Wars formula takes five different factors into account:

• A streaming service’s quality of TV content (and not just original content)
• A service’s buzz or hype (Did it have a good week?)
• A service’s level of prestige (Does it win awards?)
• A service’s utility as an app (Does it make TV watching better?)
• The average cost of a service

Plugging these metrics into our formula—while giving particular weight to quality of content and buzz—produces a Streaming Wars score. The services with higher Streaming Wars scores are not only prevailing at the moment, but also the ones most worth paying for. Knowing which streaming services are on top can feel downright impossible. And things are only getting messier. Hopefully this guide can make it a little easier and bring you back to the days when watching TV was so much simpler.

Remember a few years ago when everyone started writing those “We MUST Appreciate LeBron James While We Still Can” articles because LeBron’s dominance had been so consistent that it had begun to seem casual? Well, you could say that Netflix is now in the LeBron zone. This year has done nothing to dissuade the notion that Netflix is winning the Streaming Wars. The company added 9.33 million subscribers in Q1, a number well above expectations, and also saw a 15 percent jump in revenue year over year—but at the same time, its supremacy is so well-cemented that this all feels like business as usual. Meanwhile, other streamers have made leaps that feel more notable relative to their more paltry market shares. We all know that Netflix is dominating, but it is dominance by inertia more than anything. The streamer can turn a series into a sensation unlike any other, and it’s continued to do so in 2024 with everything from Griselda to Baby Reindeer to The Gentlemen to Season 6 of Love Is Blind—yet on the other hand, the one Netflix series that felt primed to become a sensation in 2024, 3 Body Problem, mostly came and went. Is that strange? Yes. Does it matter? Not really! Netflix can rest easy knowing that it has the command of the most eyeballs—and it clearly couldn’t care less about which shows those eyeballs turn toward. —Andrew Gruttadaro

Hulu may now be fully under the umbrella of Disney, but it very much retains a reputation of its own thanks to yet another subsidiary: FX. The network’s premiere of Shogun received more than 9 million views across Hulu, Disney+, and Star+ in its first six days, making it Disney’s best worldwide debut for a non-Marvel or non–Star Wars show. Whether the majority of those viewers came from Hulu’s native app or the new Disney+ combo hub is mostly irrelevant—Shogun is branded as an “FX on Hulu” production, a feather in the streamer’s cap given the show’s universal acclaim. 

In the wake of Shogun’s run, Hulu is holding itself over with well-received series like Under the Bridge, and it has plenty of goodwill left over from recently concluded shows such as Fargo and Ryan Murphy’s Feud: Capote Vs. the Swans. But the next big moment for the streamer will undoubtedly come in June, when Season 3 of The Bear premieres. Hulu will hope its consistently robust catalog—along with a recently rolled out password-sharing crackdown—will be a boon to its subscriber count. —Aric Jenkins

When we last checked in on Max, the discussion was rooted more in the news surrounding the mega sports streaming app from Warner Bros. Discovery, ESPN, and Fox, which is said to be debuting this fall. As we head into the summer of 2024, the conversation is more about the hits that rise above the content clutter. Say what you will about how it ended, but there were at least five weeks in which the timeline tuned in to True Detective: Night Country. Meanwhile, Curb Your Enthusiasm came to a close in April, leaving HBO without another guaranteed eyeball grabber. But reinforcements for the loss of Larry David are on the way: Hacks returns for its third season soon, bringing some critically acclaimed comedy back to the regular rotation, and the summer will see the returns of House of the Dragon and another critical darling, Industry. A dynamic second season from those dragons could put Max in a stellar position for now, but WBD will need more series—such as ID’s Quiet on Set or Max originals such as Tokyo Vice and Conan O’Brien Must Go—to take off so the app doesn’t feel like it’s being held up by whatever HBO banger is currently on, or whatever NBA highlights we missed from the night before. —khal

It’s been well-established that Apple is a reliable hub for science fiction, what with hits such as Silo, Foundation, For All Mankind, and, of course, Severance (finally returning later this year). Now, the service has captivated history buffs with series like Masters of the Air, Manhunt, and Franklin—not to mention original films such as Napoleon and Killers of the Flower Moon. Apple doesn’t produce a ton of original content, but when it does, it knows how to find an audience. Subscribers can find samplings of other genres in between—neo-noirs (Sugar), 30-minute comedies (Loot), and prestige period series (Palm Royale). Up next, in June: a legal thriller, Presumed Innocent, starring Jake Gyllenhaal in his first major television role. —Aric Jenkins

Prime Video has had a knockout year thus far. The streamer kicked off 2024 with a pretty drastic addition to its content strategy: commercials. In order to escape the barrage of advertisements, subscribers must now opt into Prime’s “new” ad-free plan, which rolled out in late January and costs an additional $3 per month. The benefits are already showing: Amazon has earned $11.8 billion in ad revenue during Q1—a 24 percent bump from the same time last year—in part because of the implementation of streaming TV advertising. Morgan Stanley forecasts the move will net Amazon more than $3 billion in revenue this year alone, with the potential to reach upwards of $7 billion come 2026. Despite the price hike, Prime’s audience stuck around and showed up in a big way for its TV slate. Donald Glover’s Mr. & Mrs. Smith set the tone in February when it dropped all eight episodes at once and clocked more than 964 million minutes watched in its first three days. Video game adaptation Fallout followed suit and attracted more than 65 million viewers in a little bit more than two weeks on the service, making it the second-most-watched Prime title ever, behind only The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. And that’s not all! Road House, the Jake Gyllenhaal–led remake of the 1989 classic, became Prime’s most successful streaming film debut ever upon its release.

Prime is winning in the arena of live sports as well. This year, Amazon has deepened its ties with the NFL even more by acquiring exclusive rights to stream a playoff game next season, aping a move that worked wonders for Peacock. For those keeping count, Amazon now has the rights to Thursday Night Football and a postseason game, with a high possibility that the NFL also runs back another branded Black Friday game. There are also reports that Amazon reached an early agreement with the NBA to stream basketball games in the near future. Not too shabby, Bezos. —Kai Grady 

The years of leaning on IP are over. Now it’s time to consolidate power. The streamer built by superheroes and Star Wars saw its status diminish throughout 2023, as Marvel’s stranglehold on pop culture dissipated to reveal that Disney+ didn’t have much else to offer. But Disney and its CEO, Bob Iger—fresh off of winning a proxy battle—are too big to not have a backup plan, and the early months of the Mouse’s year were defined by major moves. The highlights are aplenty: plans to create a “games and entertainment universe” with partner and Fortnite developer Epic Games; the acquisition of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour concert film; a sports-focused streaming bundle featuring offerings from Disney, Warner Bros., and Fox; the launch of a different sports streaming app focused on ESPN; and a plan set for June 2024 to crack down on password sharing. Disney+ has also found its way to some non-Marvel hits this year, from the aforementioned Taylor Swift doc to Percy Jackson and the Olympians to the acclaimed  X-Men ’97. But the larger point is that its parent company is beginning to throw its weight around, turning the Streaming Wars into a battle that goes down not on television screens, but in the boardroom. —Andrew Gruttadaro

It’s been an unusual four months for Peacock this year, full of record-breaking highs and extended slumps. The NBCUniversal-owned service kicked off 2024 on an uncharacteristic heater, led by its exclusive “broadcast” of the Dolphins-Chiefs playoff game in mid-January. That game, which averaged 23 million viewers on Peacock, became the most-streamed event in U.S. history, so it’s no surprise that Peacock already decided to go back to the football well and renew its partnership with the NFL for next year. Also in January, the much-maligned streaming service broke through on the television front with the premiere of a (quasi-)original series, Ted. No question benefiting from the massive NFL audience, the Seth MacFarlane–led prequel became Peacock’s most-watched original title ever through its first three days available. In a similar vein, The Traitors (U.S.) returned for its second season, and its premiere quickly became the most-watched reality series season debut in the history of the streamer, rounding out maybe its most competitive stretch in the Streaming Wars since it launched four years ago.

Fast-forward to today, and Peacock is in the midst of yet another lull. However, there is a significant lifeline on the horizon that might save the streamer from itself: the Paris Olympics. And NBC knows this: The media conglomerate recently announced a $2 price hike across all subscription tiers, which will go into effect for new users just in time for the Summer Games. We’ll see if being the streaming home for one of the largest international events in live sports helps springboard the rest of its offerings. —Kai Grady

During its nine-minute Q1 earnings call at the end of April 2024, Paramount announced that it halved its streaming loss from Q1 of 2023, which brings the amount lost to $286 million. The call, which also announced a shift in Paramount’s CEO, highlighted the success of adding Showtime to the app and the benefits of being the one that was streaming the Super Bowl. But that call also ended with the playing of the theme song to Mission: Impossible, which is quite fitting because, uh, now what? The theory that the CBS Sports division could be the key to keeping Paramount+ afloat sounds promising, but it isn’t in line with how the world is operating (especially considering some of Paramount’s competitors are working on a sports streaming app that could become a serious threat). Being the place where you can view Bob Marley: One Love or A Quiet Place: Day One helps, but once those two hours are over and there’s no game on, will everyone be tapping into Knuckles? What if Twisted Metal, Star Trek, and the bevy of Taylor Sheridan projects aren’t enough either? Paramount+ may be destined to occupy last place until the new CEO (or the next one, or the next one) figures out how to build the app up. —khal