As the golden age of streaming seemingly comes to an end, subscribers are canceling more of their plans to combat rising costs.
According to new data from consumer measurement platform Antenna released on Tuesday, US subscriber churn — or the act of paying users abandoning their streaming plans — was elevated last month when compared to the year-ago period.
Across all streaming platforms, churn in July stood at 6%, higher than the 4.7% seen in the same month last year. Churn rose for every major streaming service except for one: Netflix (NFLX).
Antenna's data showed churn rates eased slightly, to 3% from 3.1%, for Netflix despite the company rolling out its controversial password-sharing crackdown. Even more bullish news? The platform added about 2.6 million new subscribers in the month of July alone, Antenna said in a separate data set released on Wednesday.
Others weren't so lucky. Apple TV+ (AAPL) saw its churn rate jump to 6.4% last month versus 5.5% in July 2022. Churn rates for Disney's (DIS) service rose to 4.6% compared to 4.0% in the year-ago period, while the churn rates for Hulu, Max, and Peacock climbed by 0.8%, 1.1%, and 1.5%, respectively.
Overall, Lionsgate's Starz had the highest monthly churn in July compared to other major streaming platforms at a rate of 11.9%, followed by Peacock at 8.7% and Paramount+ at 7.4%.
Antenna determined a service's monthly churn rate by dividing cancels in a given month by subscribers at the end of the previous month.
"Churn is critical," Bank of America analyst Jessica Reif Ehrlich told Yahoo Finance. "It's really one of the biggest issues — having to replace subscribers, the marketing costs. It's just the untold story."
Reif Ehrlich said that in order to reduce churn, companies must focus on three main areas: original content, increased engagement, and a broad range of content. She called out live sports and news as possible content catalysts when it comes to engagement.
"The more time subscribers spend, the less likely they are to churn," Reif Ehrlich said.
Antenna's report comes as prices have ballooned across all of the major streaming services.
Disney became the latest service to raise prices, announcing earlier this month it will raise the monthly price of its ad-free Disney+ and Hulu plans by more than 20% to $13.99 and $17.99, respectively.
The price jumps echo competitors as Netflix, Apple TV+, and Max all raised prices over the past year.
Added up, the cost of these services now rival the dreaded cable TV bundle of years past — the very thing that streaming set out to undo.
Subscriber numbers at major direct-to-consumer services (DTC) including Peacock, Disney+, Hulu, ESPN+, Paramount+, Max, and Discovery+ were down by about 500,000 combined following this latest earnings season.
"Global DTC subscriber growth was 8.5% year-over-year (YoY), slowing to single digits for the first time," Macquarie analyst Tim Nollen wrote in a recent note to clients.
Despite the overall slowdown, growth was aided by Netflix's password-sharing crackdown, which helped the streamer add 5.9 million subscribers in the second quarter. Wider crackdowns on password sharing will likely become the norm as media giants weigh profitability more heavily than subscriber count.
Disney said it would be implementing its own crackdown at some point in 2024.
Alexandra Canal is a Senior Reporter at Yahoo Finance. Follow her on Twitter @allie_canal, LinkedIn, and email her at [email protected].
Click here for the latest stock market news and in-depth analysis, including events that move stocks
Read the latest financial and business news from Yahoo Finance