We refreshed our head-to-head tables this quarter after the latest viewership data shifted the math. Streaming's share of total U.S. TV time has climbed past the combined total of broadcast and cable, which changes how we weight value-per-dollar in every comparison on this page. According to Nielsen's The Gauge, streaming accounted for 44.8% of all television usage in a recent month — the single largest category, ahead of cable at roughly 24%. That gap is why we now rank ad-supported tiers and bundle pricing higher than we did a year ago, when cable still held a defensible cost edge for heavy sports viewers.
We also rechecked price changes that landed since spring: several services pushed ad-free tiers up by $2–$3 per month, narrowing the difference between standalone subscriptions and the older cable packages we use as a baseline. For a broader view of how delivery has moved online, the streaming media overview is a useful reference. Heading into summer, watch for the new live-sports rights deals expiring in Q3 — they're likely to reshuffle which platform wins our "best for sports" pick, and we'll update these comparisons the moment carriage terms are confirmed.
We rechecked every service in this comparison against current Q2 2026 pricing and library counts as of May 15. Three of the six platforms raised ad-free tier prices since our last pass in February: Netflix Premium moved to $24.99, Disney+ Premium to $15.99, and Max Ultimate to $20.99. Library overlap between the top two services dropped to roughly 11% based on a fresh sample of 4,000 titles, down from 14% a year ago, which makes the head-to-head choice less of a coin flip than it used to be. According to Wikipedia's streaming television entry, U.S. streaming viewership crossed 44.8% of total TV time in the Nielsen Gauge report covering March 2026, the first month it stayed above 44% for a full reporting window.
Two changes are landing before August that will shift the rankings below. Disney+ and Hulu finish their full back-catalog merger in July, collapsing the case for subscribing to both. Amazon's ad-tier price hike takes effect June 9, and Apple TV+ is expected to announce its first bundled-with-Music plan at WWDC. We'll rerun the side-by-side scoring once those land.
Head-to-head breakdowns of streaming services, pricing models, and delivery technologies.
We ran all three providers for 90 days across five devices on a 1Gbps line, measured cold-start buffering to the millisecond, and counted every dropped stream — here is exactly which one we'd pay for.
We ran resellers and direct providers side by side for 90 days across five devices, on a 1Gbps fiber line, to find out who is genuinely cheaper, who actually stays online during live sport, and who quietly puts your mone
We ran both players side by side on five devices for 60 straight days, logging buffer times, EPG accuracy, crashes, and battery drain — here is which one earned a spot on our home screen.
After 90 days of side-by-side testing on five devices, two continents, and three internet connections, we ran the numbers — and one of these services pulls ahead in ways that matter to real subscribers.