Yes, Netflix Is The #1 Streaming Platform—But That Is Changing Quickly Thanks To This New Player

With over 70 million subscribers in the United States and more than 182 million subscribers worldwide, it’s hard to argue that Netflix NFLX isn’t the most dominant streaming platform on the market. Netflix gets all of the biggest movie and television stars to headline its various projects, which are often multi-million dollar affairs that satisfy our thirst for big-budget blockbusters in these theater-less COVID-19 times.

But Netflix isn’t the only streaming operation to recognize the giant opportunity at hand. In the last 12 months alone, three more major competitors have made a splash onto the streaming scene as people have been forced to consume their entertainment indoors: HBO Max, Disney+ and Peacock. And one of those services is making up huge ground—to the point where it’s reasonable to theorize that Netflix won’t be the top streaming platform in just one year’s time.

The new service that could be disrupting everything? HBO Max.

That theory is based on a recent report from Reelgood, a service that allows users to keep track of where movies are playing on the various available streaming platforms. For the report, Reelgood evaluated its 2 million users’ activity and determined the top five SVoD platforms for the third quarter of 2020. Based on Reelgood users’ share of streams, the service came up with a pretty shocking chart that shows just how much the saturated streaming market has affected Netflix’s once-seemingly insurmountable dominance:

As you can see, Netflix owned 32% of the streaming shares amongst Reelgood users in the second quarter of 2020. But that share shrunk by 7% in just three months—largely thanks to HBO Max’s 6% gain. By shifting its operations to a more streaming-friendly layout that mimics Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime AMZN , HBO was able to make its deep library of award-winning shows and film more readily available to the public. And, as a result, the new service appears to be eating into Netflix’s streaming shares.

This keeps in line with a Reelgood report from earlier in 2020. HBO Max started slowly after its initial launch, but then quickly gained ground amongst streaming competitors. And this new report shows just how much more successful HBO has been than Disney—whose service didn’t increase its share of streaming numbers between the second and third quarters of 2020.

That’s probably because of HBO Max’s TV show lineup. Raised By Wolves, Lovecraft Country, The Vow, The Outside, Love Life—those are all shows that have gone viral thanks to big stars and interesting premises. HBO Max has gone for the less-is-more approach, while Netflix continues to churn out several new shows and movies each and every week. And because HBO made its layout more friendly and its library much easier to access, people have invested themselves in the Max platform.

It’s worth noting that Amazon made some headway as well. Amazon Prime gained a 1% share of streams, which is probably due to its incredibly deep library of options. While Netflix continues to diminish its library and focus on original content, Amazon Prime has continued to add more and more options. While Netflix’s movie lineup has dwindled by 40% over the past five years—to the point where the service has less than 4,000 options available at the current moment—Amazon Prime currently showcases around 13,000 films.

As all of these platforms appear to own different approaches and strategies for capturing the streaming market, it’ll be interesting to see how these streaming shares continue to change over the course of 2020. There’s only two-and-a-half months left in the year, and the Q4 report from Reelgood could show that Netflix is on its way out as the indisputable #1 streaming platform.