Tony Wang

Posted on Jul 27 • Originally published at crawlora.net

You Now Need 11 Streaming Services (~$152/mo) to Watch 2026's Most-Popular Titles — We Mapped 1,771 Offers

#datascience #data #webscraping #api

Key takeaways

We pulled the 100 most-popular US titles from JustWatch in June 2026 (50 movies + 50 shows, 1,771 offers) and mapped every offer to the service behind it. To watch all of them on subscription, you'd need 11 different streaming services — and even then you'd come up short.
Because 26 of the 100 most-popular titles aren't on any subscription at all — they're rent-only, buy-only, or still in theaters. There is no 'watch everything' subscription; the ceiling is 74%.
The 'Big Four' (Netflix, Disney+, Max, Prime Video) cover just 51 of the 100. Half the catalog lives somewhere else.
51% of the popular titles are exclusive to a single service. Netflix is the worst offender (13 of its 15 popular titles are Netflix-only); every one of Apple TV+'s 8 is exclusive. These are walled gardens, by design.
The bill is the story. Subscribing to all 11 services it takes costs ~$152/month ad-free (~$1,829/year) — about what cable cost. Even the Big Four ad-free is ~$70/month, almost exactly the $69 the average US household already spends.
And it gets worse the wider you look: across a ~5,000-title cross-section spanning every genre, content scatters across 93 different services and 61% are single-service exclusives — a concentrated head (6 services = 80% of what's streamable) with a very long tail (65 services to get all of it).
Honest caveat: this is a popularity snapshot, not a full catalog, and it's heavily a TV-vs-movies story — 98% of popular shows are on a subscription but only 50% of popular movies are (the rest are brand-new theatrical releases that simply haven't reached streaming yet).

"Streaming is the new cable" is the cliché of the decade. The interesting question is how literally true it has become — so instead of vibes, we measured it. We pulled the 100 most-popular titles in the US (the top 50 movies and top 50 shows) from JustWatch in June 2026, expanded every title into its full list of ways-to-watch (1,771 offers in total), and mapped each offer to the actual service behind it.

A method note, with the usual irony: we read availability through a structured web-data API rather than by hand. Where-to-watch data is exactly the kind of thing that's spread across hundreds of services, region-locked, and constantly changing — which is why a maintained, structured feed beats scraping each storefront. (The short version is below; full caveats are at the end.)

Methodology at a glance

Storefront & window: US, a single June 2026 snapshot. Availability changes constantly — this is a point-in-time reading.

Universe: the top 50 movies + top 50 shows by JustWatch popularity — "the titles people actually want right now," not a full catalog. A popularity sample, so treat it as the demand-weighted head of the market.

What counts as "a subscription": a standalone retail streaming service (Netflix, Disney+, Max…). We deliberately exclude live-TV bundles (YouTube TV, Philo), free ad-supported channels (Tubi, Roku Channel), single-network cable-login apps (needs a pay-TV package), and rent/buy stores. We collapse "with Ads" tiers, SD/HD/4K duplicates, and reseller channels (e.g. "Starz via Apple TV Channel") into the parent brand — otherwise the service count roughly doubles.

The open dataset: every number here is reproducible from the open dataset on GitHub (CC BY 4.0).

Full caveats are at the end. Every figure came back as structured JSON — see a sample JustWatch response.

What this means

The headline isn't "there are too many services" — everyone knows that. It's that the fragmentation is now structural and priced in: the popular catalog is deliberately split across walled gardens, the cheapest way in is an ad tier, and the most-wanted new movies aren't on subscription at all. What that implies depends on who's reading:

Cord-cutters: there is no longer a 2–3 service bundle that covers what's popular. Watching the current top 100 means 11 subscriptions (~$152/mo ad-free) — and 26 titles you still have to rent, buy, or see in a theater. Rotating subscriptions month to month is now the rational move, which is exactly why ~40% of subscribers churn.
Investors & media analysts: exclusivity is the strategy, and it's measurable. Netflix and Apple TV+ run near-total walled gardens; Disney+ and Hulu are effectively one library (they share 13 of ~15 popular titles). Read 'catalog size' as noise and exclusivity + cost-to-cover as the competitive signal.
Builders & researchers: where-to-watch is a moving target — offers churn weekly and split by country. The durable way to track it is a structured availability feed re-pulled on a schedule, not a one-time scrape; a snapshot like this one decays.
Everyone else: if it feels like your shows keep scattering across more apps and the bill keeps climbing, you're right, and here are the receipts.

It takes 11 subscriptions — and you still can't watch everything

Start with the core question: subscribe to everything you'd need to watch the current top 100, and how many services is that? Run a greedy cover over the data and the answer is 11 standalone streaming services — and that only gets you the 74 titles that are on a subscription at all.

The "Big Four" everyone defaults to — Netflix, Disney+, Max, and Prime Video — cover just over half. Each service you add after that buys you fewer new titles, all the way out to a long tail of one-title-each services:

Half of everything is a walled garden

Why does it take so many services? Because exclusivity is the whole game. 51 of the 100 most-popular titles are available on exactly one subscription service — and a handful of services account for most of those walls. Netflix is the extreme case: 13 of its 15 popular titles are Netflix-only, and every single one of Apple TV+'s eight is exclusive.

Map which services share titles and the walls are obvious. The diagonal is each service's popular-title count; every other cell is how many popular titles two services have in common:

Service	Disney+	Netflix	Max	Hulu	Prime	Param+	AppleTV+	AMC+
Disney+	15	0	2	13	1	2	0	1
Netflix (≤1 title shared with any rival)	0	15	0	0	1	0	0	1
Max	2	0	14	2	2	0	0	2
Hulu (≈ Disney+ (one bundle))	13	0	2	13	1	2	0	1
Prime Video	1	1	2	1	13	2	0	3
Paramount+	2	0	0	2	2	8	0	0
Apple TV+ (0 shared with any rival)	0	0	0	0	0	0	8	0
AMC+	1	1	2	1	3	0	0	7

Shared popular titles between the top eight services (diagonal = each service's own total). Two patterns jump out: Disney+ and Hulu overlap on 13 of ~15 titles (they're effectively one subscription), while Netflix and Apple TV+ share almost nothing with anyone — pure walled gardens. Hover a cell to read it.

The one big overlap — Disney+ and Hulu sharing 13 of their ~15 popular titles — has an obvious cause: same owner, sold as one bundle. Genuine cross-service overlap is otherwise rare. The library you're paying for on each service is mostly only on that service.

It's a TV story — and a movie problem

Before drawing big conclusions, the most important caveat, because it changes the read: the fragmentation is overwhelmingly about television. Split the universe and 98% of the popular shows are on a subscription, but only 50% of the popular movies are:

That movie gap is mostly release-window timing, not platform lock-in — the no-subscription titles are dominated by 2026 theatrical releases (the Devil Wears Prada 2*s and *Project Hail Mary*s of the moment) that will reach streaming eventually. The honest takeaway is narrower than "you can't watch anything": *new movies make you pay per view, while shows make you spread subscriptions.

The bill is the point

Add it up. The 11 services it takes to watch the streamable top 100 cost about $152/month ad-free — roughly $1,829 a year, comparable to what a cable package used to run. The cheapest path (every available ad tier) still lands near $110/month. Even the Big Four ad-free is ~$70/month — almost exactly the $69 the average US household already spends on streaming, for barely half the popular catalog.

And the cheapest tier increasingly means ads: 27% of the popular titles are only comfortably reachable on an ad-supported plan in our basket, and every major service except Apple TV+ now pushes one. The free lunch is shrinking too — Crunchyroll killed its free tier in early 2026; Amazon folded Freevee away — while free ad-supported channels (the Roku Channel, Tubi, Pluto) absorb the cost-sensitive viewers priced out of the walled gardens.

Zoom out: the wider catalog is even more split

The 100 most-popular titles are the demand-weighted head of the market. Widen the lens to a ~5,000-title cross-section — pulled across every genre and decade — and the fragmentation gets starker, not milder:

Across that wider sample the most-wanted titles are scattered over 93 distinct streaming services, in the shape of a concentrated head and a very long tail: just 6 services cover 80% of what's streamable, but it takes 65 to reach all of it — each niche service (Acorn TV, BritBox, Hidive, MUBI, Shudder, Curiosity Stream, Mhz Choice…) holds a few titles nobody else has. Netflix's wall only hardens at scale: 1,220 of its titles are exclusive — more than the next four services combined. The one thing that eases is the movie gap (70% of these movies are on a subscription vs 89% of shows), confirming the popular-100's stark 50% movie figure was a release-window artifact — brand-new theatrical titles, not permanent lockouts. The full ~5,000-title dataset is open on GitHub (CC BY 4.0).

How we did this (and the caveats)

We pulled the top 50 movies and top 50 shows by JustWatch popularity for the US in June 2026, expanded each into its full offer list, and classified every offer's provider into a service class — standalone subscription, live-TV bundle, free ad-supported channel, single-network cable-login app, or rent/buy store — collapsing ad-tier, quality, and reseller-channel duplicates into parent brands. "Subscriptions needed" counts only standalone retail streaming services. Caveats worth stating plainly: this is a popularity snapshot, not a census — the long tail of less-popular titles is even more fragmented, so every concentration figure is a floor. Availability is a moving target — offers change weekly and are country-specific (US only here), so the exact titles will have shifted by the time you read this; the shape is what's stable. The movie gap is release-window timing, not permanent lock-out. Subscription prices are list prices we maintain by hand (the one number JustWatch doesn't provide), so treat the dollar figures as current-as-of-June-2026. The wider-catalog cut samples ~5,000 titles by fanning discover across genre × decade (each call capped at 50, deduped) — a popularity-stratified cross-section, still not a census, and a few dozen obscure/regional providers in it remain unclassified (flagged in the dataset). And we make no claim about quality — only about where, and at what cost, you can watch what's popular.

If you want to check our work or run your own cut, the full dataset — the popular-100 and the ~5,000-title cross-section, as CSV + JSON — is open on GitHub (CC BY 4.0) and reproducible. Where the proprietary players on this beat (Ampere, Reelgood) publish paywalled numbers you can't verify, we'd rather show our work.

How do we read where-to-watch data that's scattered across hundreds of services? That's the day job. Crawlora is a web-data API for AI agents and pipelines that returns normalized JSON for streaming availability, search engines, marketplaces, and social platforms — handling proxies, rendering, and anti-bot — and bills pay-on-success. The same approach powers our App Store AI study, anti-bot adoption index, dead-web index, and song length study — and the JustWatch scraping guide shows how to pull this where-to-watch data yourself.

Sources

Frequently asked questions

How many streaming services do you need to watch everything?

To watch the 100 most-popular US titles in June 2026 on subscription, you'd need 11 different standalone streaming services — and even then 26 of the 100 aren't on any subscription (they're in theaters or rent/buy only). The 'Big Four' — Netflix, Disney+, Max and Prime Video — cover just 51 of them.

How much does it cost to subscribe to all the major streaming services?

About $152/month ad-free (roughly $1,829/year) for the 11 services it takes to cover the popular catalog — comparable to what cable cost. The cheapest full basket on ad tiers is about $110/month, and even the Big Four ad-free is about $70/month, almost exactly the $69 the average US household already spends on streaming.

Which streaming service has the most exclusive content?

Netflix and Apple TV+ run the most walled gardens: 13 of Netflix's 15 popular titles are Netflix-only, and all 8 of Apple TV+'s popular titles are exclusive. Across the board, 51 of the 100 most-popular titles are exclusive to a single subscription service.

Is streaming cheaper than cable now?

Not if you want the popular catalog. Subscribing to the 11 services it takes runs about $152/month ad-free — comparable to a cable bill — and you still can't stream 26 of the 100 biggest titles without renting, buying, or going to a theater. Cable's bundle problem has been recreated, just split across apps.

How was this measured?

We pulled the top 50 movies and top 50 shows by JustWatch popularity for the US in June 2026 (1,771 offers) through Crawlora's structured web-data API, classified every offer's provider into a service class, and collapsed ad-tier, quality, and reseller-channel duplicates into parent brands. It is a popularity snapshot, not a full catalog, and the underlying dataset is open and reproducible.

How many streaming services does the average household have?

About four paid services for roughly $69 a month, per Deloitte's 2026 Digital Media Trends — though households watch content from closer to seven. Our data shows the gap: actually covering the 100 most-popular titles takes 11 services, so most households underspend the catalog and rotate subscriptions to fill the gaps.

Which streaming services should I subscribe to?

If you're optimizing for the popular catalog, the four with the widest coverage are Netflix, Disney+, Max and Prime Video — together about half of the 100 most-popular titles for ~$70/month ad-free. Returns diminish fast after that (each added service unlocks fewer new titles), so the rational move is to rotate a fifth or sixth service month to month around what you're actually watching.

How do I find which streaming service a movie or show is on?

A where-to-watch service like JustWatch tracks each title's current offers across services and countries — that's the data behind this study (pulled via Crawlora's JustWatch API). Availability changes weekly and by country, so check at the moment you want to watch rather than trusting a static list.

Originally published on crawlora.net. Crawlora is a structured web-data, search, and anti-bot API — dozens of platforms as normalized JSON, plus a hosted MCP server, with a free tier (no card).

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