Find Someone Who Looks at You the Way Streaming Customers Look at BET+

Here at IndieWire, we champion the little guy. In that spirit, let’s put the Netflix love aside for a day and spotlight specialty streamers — the ones with a fraction of a premium SVOD service like Netflix’s subscriber count .

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All told, the 25 specialty SVOD services tracked by streaming-economy research company Antenna combine for almost 35 million U.S. subscriptions. The nine premium SVOD platforms they measure combine for almost 250 million subscriptions — this means that, on average, a premium SVOD service is 20 times larger than a specialty service.

And some of the specialty streamers are niche even for their niche category: Have you ever heard of History Vault, Zeus Network, or Gaia? We didn’t think so. But don’t wave the greater category away as immaterial — the specialty class is growing at a rate that far exceeds its premium kin.

In 2024, specialty-SVOD (subscription video on-demand) memberships grew by a combined 20 percent. The premium-SVOD group grew by about 8 percent. (Of course, their 8 percent growth brought in more actual subscribers than the specialty category’s 20 percent.)

The gap is widening. The prior year’s growth rate for specialty SVOD was about 27 percent; for premium, it was 17 percent. Both rates of growth are down, but it is premium’s growth rate that is declining at a greater pace. The important asterisk here is that many of the big boys — like Disney+ and Netflix — are considered to be matured in the U.S. There are few people left to attract here.

That’s not so for specialty.

Less than one-third (31 percent to be exact) of Americans have paid for a specialty SVOD service. So the opportunity is out there. But what is troubling to executives at many of these services is this stat: 68 percent of specialty-SVOD customers have only paid for one of the 25 available options. Most (58 percent) of these transactions occur through Amazon Channels, which itself is a crazy stat.

The best-available tool for specialty is bundling — either with each other, or with a premium service (or two). BET+ and Starz make sense together — both platforms feature programming that caters to Black audiences. It’s a win/win/win: BET+ gets more adoption and customers would save money. As for Starz? Loyalty.

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BET+ leads the specialty category in terms of “committed” customers, Antenna found. “Committed” customers are those who have subscribed to a particular service for more than six months and never canceled (including in the past). “Curious” customers, on the other hand, are relative newcomers — or they’ve churned out of the environment before.

The BET companion service leads specialty SVOD with 31 percent of its customers falling in the committed camp. A pair of PBS services, PBS Masterpiece and PBS Kids, tie for second place with 27 percent apiece.

As a whole, specialty services struggle with commitment: they average a 7.6 percent churn rate vs. premium’s 4.6 percent. Bundling will bring both of those rates down.

The 25 specialty SVODs measured by Antenna are A&E Crime Central, Acorn TV, ALLBLK, AMC+, BBC Select, BET+, BritBox, Cinemax, Crunchyroll, CuriosityStream, Fox Nation, Gaia, Hallmark Movies Now, History Vault, Lifetime Movie Club, MGM+, PBS Documentaries, PBS KIDS, PBS Masterpiece, PureFlix, Shudder, Sundance Now, UP Faith & Family, ViX Premium, and Zeus Network.

The nine premium SVODs are Apple TV+, Discovery+, Disney+, Hulu, Max, Netflix, Paramount+, Peacock, and Starz.

Antenna does not track consumers who get access to a streaming service through “broad intra-company bundles,” i.e. Amazon Prime. Though Prime Video is available on its own, the vast majority of Prime Video users have an overall Amazon Prime subscription as their access point. Apple TV+ is similarly included in Apple’s Apple One suite of services, but most Apple TV+ subscribers pay for the SVOD service as a standalone product.