Streaming revenues reached $176 billion in 2025, officially surpassing pay-TV

The $176 billion crossover marks the definitive end of streaming as a secondary revenue stream and its emergence as the industry's primary economic engine. While the 2025 subscriber surge suggests market vitality, the lag in revenue growth reflects the lower ARPU of subsidized ad tiers and telco bundles. The ecosystem is now pivoting from rapid acquisition to aggressive price optimization and profit protection to counter imminent market saturation. Watch for 2026 subscriber churn rates as platforms raise premium tier prices to offset lower-yielding ad-supported growth.

Omdia has tracked the online video market's trajectory for several years, and its 2025 data confirms a structural shift that analysts had projected since the early 2020s. Omdia reported that global online video revenue grew 13.5% year over year to $176 billion while pay-TV declined 4% to $170 billion, marking the first calendar year in which streaming outearned traditional television distribution worldwide. The firm attributed much of the subscriber growth to ad-supported tiers and telecom bundling, which expanded the addressable base but compressed average revenue per user.

The crossover arrives as major platforms shift strategy from subscriber acquisition to revenue maximization. Omdia's Adam Thomas noted that the 17.6% subscription increase in 2025 was the largest annual rise since 2021, driven particularly by subsidized ad-tier subscriptions offered by telecoms companies and pay-TV operators. Omdia forecasts online video subscription growth of just 5.6% for 2026, with low single-digit annual growth expected over the longer term as major streaming markets approach saturation. Senior Principal Analyst Tony Gunnarsson stated that the ad-tier uplift proved temporary and has not changed the firm's longer-term forecast.

The 2.24 billion global subscription figure reflects a market that is increasingly fragmented across services and pricing models. Online video now accounts for 68.4% of the combined 3.3 billion subscriptions worldwide, while pay-TV fell 1.8% year over year to 1.03 billion. The figures include subscription and transactional income but exclude advertising revenue, meaning the actual gap between streaming and pay-TV is even wider when ad dollars are factored in. This dynamic means that headline subscriber counts overstate the number of distinct paying households, a nuance that complicates direct comparisons with the legacy pay-TV model the industry is replacing.