Netflix maintained its dominance as the most-used streaming service in most American homes during 2026, holding its own against Amazon’s Prime Video for the second year in a row, according to the latest research shared by Parks Associates this week.
The firm’s annual Streaming Video Tracker was updated on Tuesday, found Netflix was used in 67 percent of American broadband households through September, compared with 64 percent during the same time period last year.
Netflix reclaimed its title as the top streaming service in American homes last year after falling behind Prime Video from 2022 to 2024, according to Parks Associates data.
The latest rankings show little movement among the country’s largest subscription streaming services, with the top five — Netflix, Prime Video, Hulu, Disney Plus and Peacock — retaining their positions from last year.
HBO Max moved into sixth place, overtaking Paramount Plus, which slipped to seventh. The two services traded positions last year, when Paramount Plus moved ahead of HBO Max. Apple TV ranked eighth, followed by YouTube Premium and ESPN’s streaming plans.
The research firm bases its rankings on estimated subscriber totals, drawing from its own Streaming Video Tracker, which incorporates corporate disclosures, third-party information and proprietary models.
Michael Goodman, the Director of Entertainment Research at Parks Associates, pointed to HBO Max’s established programming library, including “The Sopranos,” “The Wire” and “Game of Thrones,” along with newer series such as “The Pitt.”
“Gaining access to HBO Max’s award-winning content library is one of the things that made Warner Bros Discovery attractive to Skydance,” Goodman said in a statement. “Now that the acquisition is complete, the focus shifts to content strategy, bundling and pricing, as well as how much the company can invest in streaming growth while managing significant acquisition as well.”
Speaking on Bloomberg Tech on Tuesday, Needham & Company Analyst Laura Martin said plans announced by Skydance to launch a Paramount Plus-HBO Max streaming bundle should allow the company to raise streaming prices in the future, but warned it might not be enough to help some of the financial goals that investors expect to see in the short-term.
“Their streaming numbers look good, but some of the new numbers they disclosed make it less likely they can pay down debt faster and, in this environment, that is really what investors want to see,” Martin said.
She acknowledged that a combined Paramount-WBD streaming platform will do well in the United States, but warned that Paramount and WBD tend to have stronger competition overseas, where Netflix, Prime and Disney Plus have made significant investments challenging public service broadcasters that have the largest share of viewership.
“The Skydance streaming services are far behind that, and it is expensive to launch international services,” Martin told Bloomberg. “They have to balance the need to generate cash and cut costs with the need to expand streaming globally.”
Closer to home, Goodman said the next front in the streaming space “will be defined by how effectively providers balance subscription pricing, advertising revenue and customer retention.”
“Our research shows that 54 percent of U.S. internet households subscribe to five or more SVOD services, yet household video spending is relatively stable,” Goodman noted. “Consumers are willing to maintain multiple subscriptions, but providers cannot assume that more subscriptions will translate into spending.”
That could explain why some providers, like Charter’s Spectrum TV, continue to experience higher churn in their business despite bundling in network-owned streaming services into their legacy TV plans. Charter often markets its newer Spectrum TV plans as saving consumers well over $100 per month based on the individual cost of apps like Hulu, Disney Plus, Paramount Plus, HBO Max and AMC Plus, but the company continues to log disconnects almost every quarter. (Last week, Charter said it lost 77,000 video customers during the third quarter of the year.)
Allowing customers to pick and bundle their own subscriptions appears to be a better formula: Consumer data from Bango and other companies have consistently shown a desire by streamers to purchase bundled subscriptions offered by telephone companies, banks and other services.
“As budgets tighten, people are not only rethinking what they pay for, but how they access subscriptions in the first place,” Giles Tongue, the Vice President of Marketing at Bango, said in April. “That could mean accepting ads, looking for discounts or turning to bundles that make subscriptions easier to manage and better value.”
Parks Associates is scheduled to take a deeper dive into its data on video subscriptions during its next “Future of Video: Business of Streaming” event in Marina del Rey, California, which takes place from November 17 to November 18. The Desk is an editorial partner of the event.
