Netflix has won the streaming wars! Experts say 'the streaming wars are over' as rivals like Max, Apple+ Peacock are now letting it show their top films and shows as their own services struggle for subscribers

Netflix is so dominant the major studios are it to show their major releases 250 million people have signed up – more than Max  and Disney Plus togetherRead why the 'streaming wars' are over, according to experts 

Gone are the days when you had to subscribe to any number of streaming services to keep up with the latest must-watch movies.

For Netflix has ‘won the streaming wars’ – and is so dominant the major studios have capitulated and are allowing the No1 platform to show their major releases instead of keeping them exclusively for their own channels.

That’s the stark verdict from one leading industry observer, former Hollywood Reporter editor Matthew Belloni, who backed up his opinion with a startling finding.

‘ALL of the Netflix Top 10 movies right now are licensed from legacy studios, and 9 are from studios with their own streaming services (including 4 recent hits from Warner Bros.). The Streaming Wars are officially over,’ he tweeted.

The landmark moment effectively means that Netflix’s rivals have handed in the towel, with the major movie and TV studios who spent fortunes developing competitors – an estimated $5bn in the past year alone – admitting they will never topple the streaming giant.

By any measure, Netflix is so far ahead that everyone is at best competing for second place.

In terms of sheer subscriber numbers, it can boast about 250 million people who have signed up – that’s more than Max (formerly HBO Max) and Disney Plus put together. Even the behemoth that is Amazon Prime lags 50 million subscriptions behind.

Logging the amount of time viewers spent on each platform and network yields results that testify even more brutally to the dominance of Netflix.

In a snapshot of US viewing over last Thanksgiving, ratings expert Nielsen found the streamer had a share of all output – including broadcast and cable – of 7.4 per cent.

That may not sound that much, but bear in mind that Amazon Prime could boast just 3.4 per cent and everyone else struggles far further behind.

NBC Universal – which owns Peacock – has handed over rights to Suits, the legal show featuring Meghan Markle as Rachel Zane and Patrick J. Adams as Mike Ross

Amazon’s Prime Video is second to Netflix – but trailing by 50 million subsribers. Candy Cane Lane with Eddie Murphy was a bit hit this Chrismtas

Ashoka has been a hit on Disney+. Mary Elizabeth Winstead played Hera Syndulla

These are the kind of figures that get mouths watering on Wall Street, translating into a share price that has climbed from under $200 back in 2022 to near enough $500 this week.

So how did Netflix see off the threat from rival corporations which had once been determined to invest virtually unlimited amounts of cash to grab its streaming crown?

Go back just a few years and the future seemed uncertain for the pioneering streamer that had begun life as a DVD mail order service before CEO Ted Sarandos oversaw its transformation to meet the challenges of the digital age.

Long-standing titans of traditional media had started up their own streamers and were now determined to see off the challenge of the upstart new kid on the block.

That meant cutting off the supply of popular content: Warner Bros Discovery took Friends off Netflix to show it instead on Max. The Office also came off Netflix so NBCUniversal could show it on the Peaccock service.

Meanwhile, the reputation Netflix had won for ‘prestige TV’ with landmark series such as House Of Cards and Stranger Things was evaporating as later new shows left critics disappointed.

Hollywood historian Peter Biskind – author of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls – in December pronounced his savage verdict to Fortune: Netflix in-house productions are simply ‘unwatchable’.

Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez Hulu in Only Murders in the Building on Hulu

Ember, voiced by Leah Lewis, left, and Wade, voiced by Mamoudou Athie in a scene from the animated film Elemental – a hit on Disney+

Legions of viewers of Bridgerton, The Crown and You would disagree, and later this year Netflix will be unveiling hotly awaited new shows including the romantic comedy One Day and epic sci-fi blockbuster The 3 Body Problem.

But its seemingly unassailable pole position means it no longer has to worry about surviving on the attractions of its own shows. Hollywood knows there is only one distributor that will give you exposure to the biggest possible audience.

That’s why DC superhero blockbuster Aquaman was among four Warner Bros films in the Netflix top 10. NBC Universal has handed over rights to Suits, the legal show featuring Meghan Markle. Disney is offering to stream 14 titles including Lost on Netflix.

For Warners chief David Zaslav, the hope is that ‘People come back and then they want to see the full bouquet of DC movies and the only place to do that is with us,’ meaning his company’s own streaming service, Max.

Time will tell if such hopes are borne out, but the only certainty now is the winner in the streaming wars of the early 2020s.

While Disney and Paramount nurse their wounds and consider cutbacks, ‘Netflix has pulled away,’ as former Turner Broadcasting chief executive John Founder recently pronounced in the Financial Times.

Not only can it boast enviable figures, but its latest innovation of a two-tier subscription scheme appears to be working well, with 23 million subscribers signing up to its cut-price advertising-based plan (costing $6.99 a month against the standard fee of $15.49) after just two months.

While other streamers face an uncertain future, it seems budget-conscious viewers will be drawn in ever-increasing numbers to Netflix. Its slogan ‘See what’s next…’ has never been more prescient.

The vast majority of streaming platforms have increased in price in the last year – some by as much as 43 percent

It now costs over $120 to sign up to nine major streaming services in the US, it would have cost just over $100 a year ago, DailyMail.com analysis found. 

Increasing numbers of Americans are canceling their subscriptions as the monthly cost of the leading services soar.

In November, across the eight main services, defections rose to 6.3 percent. That is up from 5.1 percent a year earlier, according to analytics firm Antenna.

Over the past two years, around a quarter of US subscribers to the major streaming services – AppleTV+, Amazon’s Prime Video, Max, Peacock, Paramount+, Netflix, Hulu and Disney+ – have ditched at least three of them.

Subscribing to a suite of streaming services has previously been seen as a more cost effective alternative to cable TV – but it may not actually save money to cut the cable cord completely.