Nearly 1 in 4 Americans Say Netflix Has Gotten Worse in the Last Year — Study

Tony Maglio
·2 min read

Come on guys, “Avatar: The Last Airbender” wasn’t that bad. (Lindsay Lohan’s “Irish Wish,” pictured above, may have been.)

According to a March 11, 2024 CableTV.com poll of 1,000 U.S. streaming users, nearly one in four (24 percent to be exact) believe Netflix has gotten worse over the past year. The silver lining is that Netflix is still the most favored streamer overall: a third (33 percent) of the respondents say they would still pick Netflix over any other service, and only 22 percent said they have a “negative opinion” of the streaming leader. In non-survey-land, Netflix just keeps on growing: by the end of March it had 270 million global paid subscribers.

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On the flip side, only 3 percent of the survey’s participants would choose Apple TV+ for their first pick; 47 percent of Americans have a negative view of Apple’s SVOD service. Maybe they just really, really want “Severance” to come back already with its second season (but probably not). We surely do.

Max didn’t have it much better: 41 percent say they have a negative opinion of the combination of HBO Max and Discovery+. A third (33 percent) say they don’t like Disney+ (eh, have kids), and about a quarter (24 percent) have a negative opinion of Hulu.

How poorly viewed is Peacock, you may be asking? Well, it wasn’t even in the survey, so make of that what you will. It’s still worth a mention from us — NBCUniversal parent Comcast on Thursday revealed Peacock had 34 million paid subscribers at the end of March.

After Netflix, Disney+ lost the most luster over the past 12 months: one in five (20 percent) say it’s gotten worse. Apple TV+ and Max (both 17 percent say they’ve gotten worse) maintained their quality a bit better, but Amazon Prime Video (15 percent) and Disney’s Hulu (14 percent) held up the best year to year.

All told, 15 percent of the respondents said they just straight-up don’t like streaming. Of course, this was a poll conducted by a website literally named for cable television, the very medium that streaming basically buried. There could be some self-selecting in this sample, which the website says was “post-stratified” to reflect American demographics.

About a third said streaming services are becoming less worth the money (36 percent), are just not at all worth the money (34 percent), and are pissed about the password-sharing crackdowns (30 percent). Perhaps 300 or so of the respondents were just grumpy that day.

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