Price Increases Aren’t the Only Reason Consumers Cancel Streaming Services

As streaming services attract more viewers, they risk losing subscribers if the experience they provide doesn’t make them happy.

While steep increases in prices by services including Netflix, Disney+, Peacock and Apple TV have consumers looking to cut back, a new report from Gracenote, Nielsen’s content data business, finds that streamers are bothered by the number of services available and the difficulty in choosing what to watch from the volume of programming available.

Gracenote’s 20025 State of Play Report includes a new survey of consumers in the U.S., U.K., Germany, France, Brazil and Mexico. 

While viewers mostly love streaming, 45% said the streaming experience is overwhelming and 49% said they were willing to cancel a service based on the difficulty in finding something to watch.

More than 46% of streaming viewers agree that it's getting harder to find the content they want to watch because there are too many streaming services.

The amount of content available to streaming has been rising. Gracenote’s Data Hub shows that the five major subscription services it tracks have increased the number of titles in their catalogs by 17.3%. Free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) channels have increased their programming by 11%.

The survey found that about 33% of streamers felt that their TV experience was negatively impacted by content and service fragmentation and in the younger adult demo–25 to 34 years old–that figure rises to 40%. 

The longer it takes for viewers to find something to watch, the less enjoyable the streaming experience becomes. On average, consumers globally spend 14 minutes searching for what to watch. In the U.S., the amount of time is 12 minutes, up from 10.5 minutes in mid-2023. (The French spent the most time searching for content–26 minutes.)

That seemingly eternal search for something to watch can be dangerous for the streaming services that can’t make it easier for subscribers to find a selection. According to the survey, 19% of people will abandon a viewing session if their content search is not successful. This jumps to 29% for viewers in the 18-24 age group. 

“Effective search, discovery and recommendation capabilities that enable platforms to connect viewers to the content they’ll enjoy most are more critical than ever,” said Tyler Bell, senior VP of Product at Gracenote. “Organizations that deliver these capabilities will simplify the fragmentation of content and channels which impact viewers’ entertainment experiences. In doing so, they can capitalize on opportunities to become the first and most valuable viewing sources for their users.”

As sports moves to streaming, finding the game they want to watch can be a struggle for sports fans. NFL games can be found on seven different streaming services. 

Features viewers said would improve their experiences include a single guide presenting content information across all services and for platforms to tell them where to find specific programs wherever they are available. In the survey, 66% of respondents said they were interested in these capabilities. 

With viewers going to the internet for content-related searches before using in-service capabilities, publishers and platforms have a significant opportunity to change behavior and keep users engaged, the report said.

Streaming audiences don’t always get the help they need from recommendation engines. More than one-fourth of streaming consumers don’t believe menu recommendations are a useful resource for finding the content they’re looking for. 

When looking for something to watch, only 28% of streaming viewers decide to watch something based on a service recommendation.

Looking ahead, increased use of artificial intelligence and large language models for content discovery will be transformative for audiences, the report said. “Not only will they allow platforms and services to break from the limitations of traditional search infrastructures, they will enable sophisticated queries from consumers that will drive more topical and relevant responses. They can also reduce the intensive engineering work involved with harmonizing and normalizing entertainment data from disparate sources.”

The report concludes that while CTV has become the future of TV, that future is no longer contained in a single, easy-to-navigate environment.

“The explosion of content and content sources over the past decade has not led to an increase in total TV usage. While time spent with CTV has dramatically increased, that engagement is now splintering across myriad channels, services and platforms. Just as it always has been, viewer engagement is the lifeblood of any publisher, which places a heightened level of importance on the user experience,” the report concluded. “With the time it takes to find content on the rise and viewers’ inclinations to cancel or abandon when they don’t find what they’re looking for, publishers have a distinct opportunity to make their value propositions the ones audiences rely on.”

The 2025 Gracenote State of Play report is based on findings from a recent survey of 3,000 consumers in Brazil, France, Germany, Mexico, the U.K. and the U.S.

Gracenote said that its program metadata  is used for advanced content search and discovery and provides insight into content enabling better, data-driven decision-making. Additionally, Gracenote meta data is used for contextually driven ad targeting.