Consolidation Countdown: Which Streaming Services Won’t Survive 2025 as Standalone Brands?
How a year of mergers, price hikes, and ad shifts reshaped the streaming lineup
By the end of 2025, streaming is clearly how most people watch TV in the U.S.
But that simple headline masks a messier story underneath.
Viewers are paying more. Advertisers are paying less per viewer.
And several familiar streaming brands have already been folded into bigger apps, shut down, or quietly scaled back.
Using data from Nielsen, Deloitte, company filings, and recent merger announcements, here is where the industry stands in December 2025, and which services look unlikely to keep going as truly independent apps.
Streaming Now Dominates TV, but Growth Has Hit a Ceiling
In viewing time, streaming already won.
In May 2025, streaming accounted for 44.8% of all U.S. TV usage, according to Nielsen’s Gauge report. Cable fell to 24% and broadcast to 20%, meaning streaming surpassed both traditional formats in the same month for the first time on record. YouTube alone held 12.5% of total TV viewing, while free ad‑supported platforms like Pluto TV, The Roku Channel, and Tubi together drew 5.7% of all viewing time.
The stack of cords in American living rooms has shrunk just as quickly.
Pew Research reported in April 2025 that 83% of U.S. adults used streaming services, while only 36% still had a cable or satellite subscription at home. More than half, 55%, watched streaming but had no pay‑TV at all.
Traditional pay‑TV penetration keeps falling. S&P Global Market Intelligence says the share of U.S. households with cable or satellite dropped from more than 80% in 2011 to 34.4% by the end of 2024. Legacy cable, satellite, and telco TV providers lost 6.3 million subscribers in 2024, bringing live TV penetration down to 38.5% of U.S. homes when you include virtual services like YouTube TV.
There was one small exception.
In the third quarter of 2025, total pay‑TV video subscribers increased for the first time since 2017, with a net gain of 303,000. Analysts tied that to football season and growth at virtual MVPDs such as YouTube TV. Traditional cable operators like Comcast and Charter still lost subscribers in that period.
Viewed together, the numbers say one thing clearly: people have already moved to streaming. The open question is which streamers they will keep.
Households Are Near Their Streaming Limit
If you feel like you are juggling too many apps, the data backs that up.
Deloitte’s 2025 Digital Media Trends survey found the average U.S. subscriber to paid video streaming held four services and spent about $69 per month on them. That represented a 13% increase in spending year over year, and around 20% for Gen Z and millennials.
Other estimates line up. A synthesis of industry data from Deloitte, Simon‑Kucher, and Leichtman Research, compiled by The Motley Fool, also pegged the typical household at about four video streaming subscriptions.
Cord‑cutters carry a similar load.
A 2025 survey reported by TV Technology found cord‑cutters subscribe to an average of 3.4 streaming platforms and spend roughly $48.13 per month. Three out of four cord‑cutters, 74%, said they had canceled at least one streaming subscription in the last year.
Price fatigue is obvious in the survey work.
Deloitte found 47% of respondents believed they pay too much for the streaming platforms they use. Forty‑one percent said the content was not worth the price, up five points from 2024. In that same study, 60% of people said a $5 price increase at a favorite service would prompt them to cancel.
Churn data from analytics firm Antenna, summarized by Forbes, shows how that frustration plays out. Across nine major subscription services, including Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, Max, Paramount+, Peacock, Apple TV+, Starz, and Discovery+, there were 174.3 million new U.S. sign‑ups in 2024. There were also 147.8 million cancellations. Net additions were only 26.5 million, the lowest in three years, and retention fell to 15% from 27% in 2022.
In Deloitte’s own 2025 survey, 39% of consumers said they had canceled at least one paid streaming subscription in the previous six months. That figure climbed above 50% for Gen Z and millennials.
In other words, streaming now feels less like a one‑way march upward and more like a game of musical chairs.
Ad Dollars Shift to Streaming While Prices Sink
The advertising market has been learning its own lessons.
Streaming’s share of upfront ad commitments is rising fast, but the price of a viewer impression is falling. That puts pressure on services that built their plans on high ad rates.
For the 2024 — 25 upfront cycle, Media Dynamics estimated that streaming attracted $11.1 billion in upfront ad commitments, a 35% jump over 2023. In the same cycle, linear TV upfront spending, covering broadcast and cable, dropped 4% to $18.4 billion.
MediaPost’s analysis of the same period found that while total national TV volume grew, average CPMs across national TV fell 9.8% year over year to $31.70 for adults 18 and older. Streaming CPMs dropped the most, down 17% to $29.50. Broadcast fell 6% to $45.34 and cable slipped 7% to $20.60.
The trend continued into 2025.
Media Dynamics figures cited by eMarketer show linear TV upfront spending fell again, from $18.4 billion in 2024 to $17.8 billion in 2025. Broadcast primetime ad sales declined 2.5% to $9.1 billion, cable upfronts dropped 4.3% to $8.7 billion, and streaming surged another 17.9% to $13.2 billion.
Ad analyst Brian Wieser projected that national TV advertising, covering broadcast, cable, and syndication, would fall 11.4% in 2025 to $35.3 billion. At the same time, he expected “pure‑play” connected TV, meaning premium streaming that excludes YouTube, to grow 26% to $7.8 billion.
So advertisers are following viewers into streaming. However, lower CPMs and heavy competition mean not every platform can rely on advertising to bail out its business model.
FAST and Ad‑Supported Streams Become the Center of Gravity
One of the most important shifts in 2024 and 2025 happened on the free side.
Gracenote projected the number of unique free ad‑supported streaming TV (FAST) channels would reach 1,943 in 2024. Nielsen’s data for the same year showed FAST services like Pluto TV, The Roku Channel, and Tubi accounted for 4.3% of all streaming. That gave them a larger combined share than Peacock, Max, and Paramount+ together at 3.7%.
The trend only strengthened in 2025. By March, Cord Cutters News reported The Roku Channel had reached 2.2% of all U.S. streaming, widening its lead as the top FAST service. Paramount started reporting Pluto TV together with Paramount+ in Nielsen’s Gauge, and that combined grouping accounted for 2.3% of streaming.
Comscore’s 2025 State of Streaming report found hours watched on major ad‑supported services jumped 43% year over year as of August 2025. It also reported that 96.4 million U.S. internet homes streamed content, the average household used 6.9 streaming services of any kind, and total streaming time hit 13.9 billion hours, up 6% from the prior year.
Nielsen data for the second quarter of 2025 put a finer point on it. Ad‑supported TV content, including streaming and linear, made up 73.6% of all TV viewing. Ad‑supported streaming alone captured a 45.3% share of ad‑supported viewing, surpassing both cable at 28.7% and broadcast at 26%.
On the subscription side, Antenna’s numbers show that ad‑supported tiers already accounted for 57% of new sign‑ups where they were available. That helps explain why almost every major platform now runs a cheaper plan with ads.
As ad‑supported usage rises and subscription growth slows, platforms face a choice: bulk up through consolidation, or risk getting squeezed between larger rivals and booming FAST services.
The First Big Wave of Consolidation: 2024 — 2025
The last two years turned speculation about consolidation into concrete deals.
Disney, Hulu, and the bundle era
Disney spent 2024 and 2025 pulling Hulu closer.
“Hulu on Disney+” launched for U.S. Disney Bundle subscribers on March 27, 2024, giving bundle customers Hulu content inside the Disney+ app. In June 2025, Disney completed its acquisition of Comcast’s remaining 33% stake in Hulu, paying $8.61 billion under a long‑standing put/call agreement.
At that point Hulu had more than 50 million subscribers, and Disney’s total streaming base reached 180.7 million. CEO Bob Iger said the deal “paves the way for a deeper and more seamless integration” of Hulu and Disney+ along with an upcoming ESPN streaming product.
Disney has already outlined the next step. In August 2025, the company announced plans to fully migrate Hulu into Disney+ in the United States, creating a unified app in 2026. Disney will still sell Disney+ and Hulu as separate subscriptions, but under one interface. Internationally, the “Star” hub inside Disney+ will be replaced by Hulu as the general‑entertainment brand.
Bundling became another key strategy.
Disney Entertainment and Warner Bros. Discovery launched a joint Disney+, Hulu, and Max bundle in the U.S. on July 25, 2024. It costs $16.99 per month with ads and $29.99 without, a discount of up to 38% compared to buying the services separately.
Sports experiments and a pivot toward Fubo
A proposed joint sports streamer also ran into a wall.
Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery announced Venu Sports in February 2024, a combined sports streaming venture. They abandoned those plans on January 10, 2025, after a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction in an antitrust suit brought by Fubo.
As part of resolving that conflict, Disney agreed to merge Hulu + Live TV with Fubo. Disney will take a 70% stake in the combined company, which will operate under the Fubo brand and leadership and serve about 6.2 million subscribers in North America.
Here again, a standalone streaming offer is getting absorbed into a larger package.
Paramount and Skydance combine
On the studio side, Paramount Global and Skydance Media completed their merger on August 7, 2025, creating “Paramount, a Skydance Corporation.” The new company trades under the ticker PSKY.
In announcing the deal, management said the combined business would “streamline” operations and invest in content using Paramount’s library and worldwide distribution together with Skydance’s production and technology capabilities. Paramount’s streaming division, which includes Paramount+ and Pluto TV, reached profitability in 2025, with $340 million in profit noted in TheWrap’s scoreboard, up from $49 million a year earlier.
The new ownership has emphasized unified ad‑tech and a tighter integration between Paramount+ and Pluto TV, which again points toward fewer separate consumer brands over time.
Warner Bros. Discovery rethinks its lineup
Warner Bros. Discovery has spent much of this period reversing earlier choices.
In May 2025, WBD said it would rebrand Max back to HBO Max, emphasizing the HBO name as a marker of quality. Executives noted that the streaming unit had swung profitability by nearly $3 billion in two years and added 22 million subscribers in the previous year. The company set a target of 150 million streaming subscribers by the end of 2026.
At the same time, WBD has been winding down Discovery+ in markets where HBO Max (formerly Max) is available. New subscriptions and renewals stopped in overlapping European countries in 2024. Discovery+ shut down entirely in Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, and Spain in December 2024, in Brazil in February 2025, and in Turkey in April 2025.
In December 2025, Netflix took the consolidation storyline one step further. On December 5, the company announced a deal to acquire the streaming and studio assets of Warner Bros. Discovery for $82.7 billion, including Warner Bros. studios and HBO. Under the proposal, WBD’s linear networks and Discovery+ would be spun off into a new public company, Discovery Global.
As of mid‑December, that transaction remains a proposal, pending shareholder votes and regulatory review. If it closes, it would be the largest streaming consolidation yet.
Smaller brands already folded or shut down
Below the headline services, the industry has already shed several standalone apps.
- Paramount integrated Showtime into Paramount+ and rebranded the main linear Showtime channel as “Paramount+ with Showtime” on January 8, 2024. The standalone Showtime streaming service shut down on April 30, 2024.
- Lionsgate has been dismantling its Lionsgate+ service, the international brand for Starz. The company exited large parts of Europe and Japan by early 2024, then decided to close Lionsgate+ in Latin America and the U.K., citing economic and industry challenges.
Discovery+, Showtime’s app, and Lionsgate+ give a preview of what “not surviving” looks like in this market. The brands still exist in some form, but as independent streaming destinations they have already been cut back or retired.
Who Looks Safest Heading Into 2026?
With all this consolidation, a few players are clearly positioned as long‑term consolidators rather than targets, at least based on current financials.
TheWrap’s November 2025 scoreboard highlights how far many big services have come on profitability:
- Netflix reported $2.55 billion in profit in the third quarter of 2025, up from $2.36 billion a year earlier. It confirmed more than 300 million global subscribers. Its ad‑supported plan reported 94 million monthly active users in May 2025, up from 70 million in November 2024, and accounted for 55% of new sign‑ups in markets where it is offered.
- Disney’s entertainment streaming division, mainly Disney+ and Hulu, produced $352 million in profit in its latest quarter. Disney said entertainment streaming operating income reached $1.33 billion in fiscal 2025, up from $143 million in 2024.
- Warner Bros. Discovery’s streaming segment generated $345 million in profit in TheWrap’s comparison, with the company expecting at least $1.3 billion in streaming profit for full‑year 2025.
- Paramount’s streaming unit, which includes Paramount+ and Pluto TV, produced $340 million in profit, versus $49 million a year before. Its second quarter 2025 direct‑to‑consumer adjusted OIBDA reached $157 million on $2.16 billion in revenue, with 77.7 million subscribers.
- Peacock remains unprofitable, but losses have narrowed significantly. In the third quarter of 2025, Peacock’s loss shrank to $217 million, from $436 million a year earlier, on $1.36 billion in revenue. Paid subscribers held at around 41 million, according to Sports Business Journal.
Warner Bros. Discovery’s streaming unit generated its first full‑year profit as early as 2023 with $103 million, while Disney’s direct‑to‑consumer group and Paramount+ both reported their first profitable quarters in late 2024.
These numbers matter because many analysts now argue that scale and profitability, not just subscriber counts, determine which services can stand on their own.
Services Already in Retreat
If the giants are learning how to make money, smaller or more narrowly focused services are cutting back.
Discovery+ is the clearest example from a major owner. Its shutdown in several European markets, Brazil, and Turkey where HBO Max operates shows how WBD is consolidating content into one flagship app wherever it can.
Showtime’s standalone streaming app is already gone. All current streaming access to Showtime content now runs through Paramount+, under the “Paramount+ with Showtime” branding on linear and inside the Paramount+ interface.
Lionsgate+ has effectively exited the streaming battlefield in many regions. Lionsgate pulled the service from large parts of Europe and Japan by early 2024, then decided to close it in Latin America and the U.K. Management cited economic and industry headwinds, choosing to focus on other distribution models.
Starz, which owns the Lionsgate+ brand, has signaled openness to being acquired or merged. In 2022, CEO Jeff Hirsch told investors that after a planned separation of the studio and Starz, the network could “get bigger or become part of something bigger,” directly acknowledging M&A as a likely path.
Each of these cases involves a recognizable brand, but not one with Netflix‑level scale. They show what happens when subscriber growth, content costs, and international expansion do not line up.
The Question Marks: Niche Streamers and Smaller Networks
A separate group of services sits in the middle: not tiny, not huge, but clearly under pressure.
AMC Networks is a good example. The company runs AMC+, Acorn TV, Shudder, Sundance Now, and others. It reported 12.4 million streaming subscribers at the end of 2024, up 8% year over year. Streaming revenue grew 7% to $603 million.
At the same time, AMC Networks recorded $400 million in impairment charges and $49 million in restructuring charges in 2024. The company tied those moves to shifting programming strategies and lower investment in original shows.
In a 2022 memo explaining layoffs, CEO James Dolan wrote that cord‑cutting losses had not been offset by streaming gains, and that “the mechanisms for the monetization of content are in disarray.”
That mix of modest growth, heavy write‑downs, and blunt language about the business model does not guarantee AMC’s services will be sold or shuttered. It does, however, underline how challenging it is for mid‑sized brands to stay independent in a market moving toward giant bundles.
Industry analysts have been candid about that challenge more broadly.
Techdirt quoted LightShed Partners analyst Rich Greenfield saying, “There are too many streaming services losing too much money, and someone is going to raise the white flag.” He predicted that some “major players” would not survive in their current form.
Cord Cutters News drew a similar conclusion, writing that “there are just too many streaming services for all of them to be successful” and that “we are likely to see a number of streaming services merge or shut down in the future.”
TD Cowen analysts went further in early 2025, arguing that legacy media companies such as Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Paramount should lean into “mega‑bundles” distributed by aggregators like Apple, Amazon, Google, or cable operators. They said this approach could lower marketing costs, improve discovery, and reduce churn.
None of those comments name specific services that will disappear. They do, however, paint a picture where smaller and subscale platforms either find partners or accept shrinking roles.
So Which Streaming Brands Are Least Likely to Stay Standalone?
Looking strictly at moves already announced or underway by December 2025, a few services clearly look unlikely to keep operating as fully separate apps or brands.
Based on public statements and concrete actions, the services most obviously on a path away from standalone status are:
- Hulu in the U.S. Disney now owns 100% of Hulu and has already placed Hulu content inside Disney+ for bundle subscribers. The company has announced plans to fold Hulu fully into Disney+ in the U.S. in 2026, while keeping it as a separate subscription under a unified interface. That suggests Hulu as a distinct app will give way to Hulu as a branded tile or hub inside Disney+ over time.
- Discovery+ in HBO Max markets. Warner Bros. Discovery has stopped new subscriptions and renewals in multiple European countries where HBO Max is available and has closed Discovery+ outright in Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Spain, Brazil, and Turkey. Inside those regions, Discovery+ as a standalone entertainment destination is already disappearing.
- The standalone Showtime app. As of April 30, 2024, Showtime’s direct‑to‑consumer streaming product no longer exists. Its content now lives inside Paramount+. The Showtime name survives mainly as part of the “Paramount+ with Showtime” brand.
- Lionsgate+ internationally. Lionsgate has exited Lionsgate+ in much of Europe, Japan, Latin America, and the U.K. That effectively removes Lionsgate+ as an ongoing global streaming brand, outside a limited set of territories.
Other services face strategic pressure but do not yet have announced shutdowns or mergers. AMC’s portfolio and Starz’s domestic service fall into this category. Both have signaled cost pressures and openness to deals, and analysts broadly expect further consolidation among mid‑sized players. However, as of December 2025, no specific transactions have been confirmed for those services.
At the top end of the market, the large, profitable platforms look more like acquirers than acquisition targets. Netflix, Disney’s streaming group, Warner Bros. Discovery’s HBO Max operation, Paramount’s Paramount+ and Pluto TV, and even a still‑unprofitable but improving Peacock all have parent companies investing to keep them in the game.
The proposed $82.7 billion sale of Warner Bros. Discovery’s streaming and studio assets to Netflix, if completed, would further concentrate power in those largest hands and could accelerate the process of folding smaller services into bundles or shutting them down.
What Happens Next for Streamers in 2026
Deloitte’s 2025 Digital Media Trends report described the entertainment industry as being at a “tipping point.” The data behind that phrase is now hard to ignore.
Viewers already have, on average, around four paid video subscriptions and are spending between about $48 and $70 per month on streaming. Nearly half think they pay too much. Churn levels are high, and ad‑supported usage is surging, with FAST channels and cheaper tiers taking a large share of new sign‑ups.
On the industry side, most large streamers have pivoted from chasing subscriber growth at any cost to chasing profit. Netflix, Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Paramount have all turned their streaming segments profitable. That shift has come from a mix of price hikes, ad tiers, fewer big‑budget originals, and tighter cost control.
At the same time, upfront ad dollars are flowing into streaming while CPMs decline, meaning services must deliver large, stable audiences to make the economics work. TD Cowen’s “mega‑bundle” vision, which imagines Apple, Amazon, Google, or cable operators packaging multiple apps together for one fee, lines up with what Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery are already doing with their bundles.
For viewers, the consolidation countdown probably means fewer separate apps, more bundles with integrated search and discovery, and more advertising, even inside paid services. Some brands, like Hulu or Discovery+, may live on mainly as hubs inside larger platforms rather than as standalone logos on your home screen.
For smaller and niche streamers, the message of 2024 and 2025 has been blunt. Growing a mid‑sized service without the backing of a deep‑pocketed studio or tech giant is getting harder, not easier. The experiences of Lionsgate+, Showtime’s app, and Discovery+ in several territories show what happens when that math no longer works.
Heading into 2026, the safest bets are on a handful of global giants and a vibrant free ad‑supported ecosystem built around Roku, Pluto, Tubi, and similar services. Everyone else is either already consolidating, or quietly running out of room to stand alone.
