Unbingeable: How much are you paying for your streaming suite?

The Streaming Wars are binging towards a bubble– but whomever wins, consumers are poised to pay for their spoils.

This means war. It was December 2018 when Netflix revealed that Monica, Joey, Rachel, Chandler, Ross and Phoebe were leaving the streaming service in January of the coming year– and Twitter was not happy.

Within hours, the streaming scion shelled out $100 million to Warner Media (who will reunite their cast on their own new service, HBOMax later this month) to keep Netflix in the Friends zone for at least one more year, launching the first battle in impending Streaming Wars as services vyed for our attentions.


When Disney+ launched on November 12, 2019, war was officially declared, and the once cost-effective practice of cord-cutting (viewers cancelling multichannel cable/satellite subscriptions services in favor of streaming services) went less gangbuster, more Blockbuster.

To cut the cord or swim against the stream? Source: Giphy/Warner Media

To cut the cord or swim against the stream?
Source: Giphy/Warner Media

Today, the biggest players in the binge-watch brawl are  Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, and Disney+ (those last two majority-owned by Disney Media) with many players like Paramount+ (ViacomCBS), HBOMax (WarnerMedia) and Apple+ fighting for eye-time:

  • Of US viewers in the past year who practiced social distancing in March 2020, 68% increased their usage of Disney+, while Netflix and Hulu user viewing grew by 66%. Amazon Prime video grew by 56%.

  • Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu alone are expected to triple their combined content investments by 2022. These three behemoths own 60% of TV streaming time.

  • Netflix won seven Academy Awards at the 2021 ceremony, the most of any distributor. The second-highest number went to Disney, which took home five awards.

Wonder's analysts put together a guide to everything you need to know about the Streaming Wars, including how much you'd need to shell out to binge the whole batch compared to traditional cable.  

Read up on what they uncovered below:

View Wonder's "The Art of Streaming Wars" here

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Chris Connors