Ten American streaming services were removed from a tracker last quarter. Two were added to it. That is the entire empirical basis for a run of coverage this week reporting that standalone streaming is in decline and that the United States market is consolidating.
Both stories — TV Technology's and Broadband TV News's, published within hours of each other on 23 September — are accounts of one press release, issued that morning by Parks Associates, a research firm in Plano, Texas, promoting a webinar it is holding today. There is no Nielsen panel behind the headline, no Antenna subscription data, no Kantar survey. There is a quarterly census of streaming apps.
That is worth establishing before anything else, because the census and the market are measuring different things, and only one of them is shrinking.
What the number is
Parks Associates' Streaming Video Tracker now holds 370 service profiles in the United States and 234 in Canada. Its published series of standalone American services — a narrower count — stood at 336 at the end of the second quarter, against 366 in 2022. That is about 30 fewer in four years, or 8 per cent, at a rate of roughly seven or eight a year out of a base above three hundred.
Set that against what the audience did over the same four years. Nielsen put streaming at 48.5 per cent of all American television viewing in the June edition of The Gauge, with YouTube alone at 13.5 per cent, Netflix at 7.9, Prime Video at 4.2, The Roku Channel at 3.0 and Peacock at 2.3. Broadcast was 19.8 per cent and cable 19.5. A category that has gone from insurgent to half the screen, while its supplier count falls by 8 per cent, is not a declining market. It is a maturing one with a slightly shorter shelf.
Read the list, not the headline
The ten removals are more instructive than the total, because almost none of them is a failure.
BET+ was ended as a separate service by Paramount Skydance and its library moved into Paramount+ under a dedicated BET Hub. CTV Throwback and Movies went into Crave. FIFA+ moved to DAZN. OHL Live handed its digital rights to FloHockey. Barça One was replaced by Barça Play inside FC Barcelona's own app. RidePass stopped being a subscription and became a free ad-supported channel.
Seven of those are the same event: a brand that was not big enough to be a destination becoming a row inside something that is. The content did not go anywhere. The bill did.
Only one of the ten is a closure in the ordinary sense. FanDuel Sports Network shut its television channels and its streaming operation outright — the end of the regional-sports-network model in its last branded form, and the only entry on the list where the programming stopped rather than moved.
And two services were added in the same three months. OG Network launched as an AVOD and FAST business; TrueTVplus launched as a FAST platform carrying sport, independent film, documentaries and lifestyle. Both are free. That is the shape of the market's replacement rate: what exits is a subscription, what enters is an ad tier.
The consolidation that matters is not in the count
The removals Parks Associates logged in the second quarter are housekeeping. The consolidation that will change American television this year is happening one level above the tracker, and it does not show up as a service disappearing at all.
Paramount Skydance settled the twelve-state antitrust suit against its $110bn purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery on Monday 21 September, nine days before a ticking fee of about $7m a day starts running — a transaction that would put Paramount+ and HBO Max under one owner without either app going away. Neither would leave the count. The market would be materially more concentrated all the same.
Underneath, the free layer is absorbing the middle. Fox's Tubi now takes 2 per cent of all American television viewing on a library bought for $440m, more than HBO Max and more than Apple TV+, and the three services added or converted to free formats in the second quarter are a small version of the same movement. A count of standalone subscription apps registers a service becoming free as a loss. Its viewers experience it as a price cut.
One more reason to be careful with the number
The comparison drawn above — services against share of viewing — rests on a Nielsen figure that is itself about to move.
The June Gauge was the last edition published on the current basis. Nielsen has been trying since February to fold new universe estimates from the Advertising Research Foundation's DASH service into the measure, along with models intended to make its big-data-plus-panel sample more representative. The change was delayed twice and arrives with the 2026-27 season. Analysts who have seen the methodology expect streaming to look somewhat less dominant against broadcast and cable afterwards.
This publication has written before about what happens when a shared number stops being shared: two credible sources produce two different champions, and every party to the negotiation picks the one that flatters it. A recalibrated Gauge arriving in the same autumn as a Parks Associates series showing fewer services will give the industry two numbers pointing the same direction for entirely unrelated reasons.
The honest summary of this week is short. The number of American streaming apps is falling slowly, mostly because owners are consolidating their own brands. The number of American streaming viewers is not falling at all. Anyone quoting the first figure to explain the second is quoting a census of shelves to describe a shop.
The Q2 2026 figures, the named services, the tracker profile counts of 370 in the United States and 234 in Canada, and the quotation from Michael Goodman, Director, Entertainment Research, are from Parks Associates' press release of 23 September 2026, "Ten Streaming Services Phased Out in Q2 2026 as US Streaming Video Market Reorganizes," issued from Plano, Texas. The standalone-service series of 336 at the end of the second quarter against 366 in 2022 is the accompanying chart, "State of the U.S. Market: Total Number of Standalone Streaming Services," as read by TV Technology on 23 September; Parks Associates' release text does not restate it, and the 370 profile count and the 336 standalone count are different measures. Broadband TV News carried the same release the same day. June 2026 shares for streaming, broadcast, cable, YouTube, Netflix, Prime Video, The Roku Channel and Peacock are from Nielsen's The Gauge as published on 18 August 2026 and reported by MediaPost, which also reported that the recalibration using the Advertising Research Foundation's DASH universe estimates had been pushed from February to the start of the 2026-27 season. July 2026 Gauge figures for total streaming and for Tubi are as set out in our own reporting of 23 September. Neither trade report cites Nielsen, Antenna or Kantar data, and neither Antenna nor Kantar published figures underlying this week's coverage. Parks Associates does not publish the rule by which a service that migrates into a parent app is counted against one that ceases operating, and its release does not distinguish between the two. The arithmetic on the four-year rate of decline, and the comparison between the count of services and the share of viewing, are our own.
Topics mediastreamingtelevisionmeasurementconsolidationadvertisingparamount
