August 19th-August 25th // Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes
Below is a roundup of last week’s notable industry news, with summaries and our opinions. The current state of streaming feels like Everything Everywhere Always At Once.
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Top Story 👁
The Biggest Dogs in Streaming Want You to Use Only Their App
Source: The New York Times
August 24th, 2026
Summary: YouTube, Roku, and Netflix are all copying Amazon's playbook of selling other streaming services through their own app, which is being called “third-party subscriptions.”
YouTube just struck a five-year deal to fold Peacock into YouTube Premium (which costs $16/month) starting early next year. Netflix, long resistant to this concept, added a French broadcaster in June and has held early talks with Peacock and Fox One. Third-party subscription sales are up 19% year over year through The Roku Channel (Roku’s proprietary app).
The shift is about user retention. A few years ago, streamers were fighting for new sign-ups, but now they are trying to hold onto subscribers and become the default app on people's TVs. Users aren’t necessarily signing up for an app because it allows them to stream other services. But perhaps users are staying on an app longer, and not cancelling, if they can stream other services right there.
Overall third-party subscription sales are up ~60% over the last three years, now making up a third of all new streaming sign-ups. Amazon Prime Video leads with 49M+ third-party subs sold. Disney remains a holdout, selling their subscriptions almost entirely direct-to-consumer.
Opinion: Streaming apps initially proliferated and fragmented. Now content is getting commodified and everyone's in land grab mode. Eventually it’ll consolidate into a handful of players. The current land grab is a precursor to consolidation, and we’ve been seeing it play out in the form of M&A and bundling. Third-party subscriptions are just another flavor of the same movement, but there’s a lower barrier to entry for all parties involved and it works a little more cleanly from a financial perspective. If you’re Paramount+, why not just offer your streaming service within Amazon Prime Video if it gives you more eyeballs and more subscription revenue? Sure, you pay a fee to Amazon, but it’s a worthwhile exchange. This will likely happen more, as we move towards true consolidation and consumers demand more simplicity from their streaming experience.
The more interesting question is: who wins? Some streaming services will concede and deliberately become “distribute everywhere” apps (like Paramount+). Others will try to become “everything” apps by trying to sell other streaming services, bundling, or buying up IP (like YouTube, Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, and The Roku Channel). A couple of them will win. And a couple will lose.
As most content becomes available everywhere, we believe the following four factors will determine winners and losers in the race to become the “everything” streaming app:
Who has the best original IP that won’t be made available anywhere else? It’s Netflix, Amazon, Google. Not Roku.
Who has a distribution lead already? It’s Google, Amazon, and Netflix. Roku to a lesser extent.
Who can create economies of scale and scope for users? It’s companies that can tie exclusive content to streaming apps to streaming devices. It’s Google and Amazon. Roku to a lesser extent. Not Netflix.
Who can monetize most effectively by blending ads + subscription revenue? It’s Google, Amazon, Netflix. Not Roku (no meaningful subscription revenue).
These factors won’t have an equal impact on who wins and who loses; some will matter more than others. Also, there are a bunch of other factors to consider, e.g. who has a head start, who creates the most frictionless “everything app” UX, who has the lowest prices, who is combining live TV with video-on-demand, whose brand is the most powerful, etc. Despite all of these caveats, we’re still going to make a scoreboard, because, who doesn’t love a good scoreboard?
Oh, and we forgot about Apple, a complete wildcard in this race.
Place your bets carefully!
Other Notable Headlines 👀
'We can't sell it fast enough': Amazon gets creative amid growing women's sports demand🔒 - Amazon's premium ad slots for women's sports are basically sold out, so the company is finding new ways to get brands into the game. Amy McDevitt, Amazon Ads' head of live sports sales partnerships, says demand for Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) and National Women's Soccer League (NWSL) inventory hasn't let up, pushing her team to build out shoulder programming and custom content. Recent examples include a Lilly campaign starring Amazon analyst and former WNBA star Candace Parker, and an AT&T campaign connecting Cynthia Cooper, the league's first MVP, with current four-time MVP A'ja Wilson. Amazon is also launching its first NWSL creator cast, a Twitch alt-broadcast featuring creator commentary, presented by Hyundai. Amazon says brands that spread spend across multiple Prime Video sports properties are seeing 24% higher interaction rates versus single-event buys.
Nielsen's latest updates aim to remove bias from its measurement strategy - Nielsen just upgraded to its Big Data + Panel measurement product to improve its accuracy ahead of the fall TV season. The company is adding new data sets to better capture Spanish-language TV audiences, a group historically undercounted, using household language data from the American Community Survey. Nielsen is also leaning into its wrist-worn devices to better track co-viewing, since they don't require a log-in like traditional meters do. Separately, Nielsen will speed up how it incorporates survey data from the Advertising Research Foundation's DASH TV Universe Study, addressing publisher complaints that outdated data was skewing the balance between traditional TV and streaming numbers.
Divine, Vine’s spiritual successor, won’t rule out ads🔒 - The new short-form video social app launches Thursday, led by former Twitter employee Evan Henshaw-Plath, with funding from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey.
Vine was a six-second looping video app that Twitter acquired in 2012 then shut down in 2016-17. Users can browse a "classic" tab with over two million original Vine clips Henshaw-Plath recovered. New uploads must be recorded live in-app and can't be AI-generated. CMO Alice Chan says Divine is open to ads, but wants to avoid a single algorithm that ranks content purely by engagement, the same mechanic she says rewarded bad behavior on other platforms. Taco Bell has already signed on to run a native throwback campaign.
Other Notable Headlines
(that you should know about too) 🤓
Walmart stock tumbles 9% after outlook disappoints Wall Street (🤷) - Quarterly revenue was up 5.9%, beating estimates, driven by ecommerce, tariff refunds, and booming ad sales. Global ad revenue was up 38%, and Walmart Connect, its US ad arm, saw 43% growth. Investors wanted more.
Netflix parts ways with key ads exec in leadership shake-up🔒 - Jon Whitticom, the VP who helped build Netflix's ad tech from scratch, is out, with ads product exec Marc Heneghan stepping in on an interim basis.
WPP seeks to seal 'highly confidential and sensitive' client information from lawsuit with former exec🔒 - Fired WPP exec Richard Foster alleges he was let go for flagging an improper rebate scheme. WPP argues Foster's filing exposes trade secrets, client lists, and privileged legal conversations.
$2.75B AI startup Hightouch poaches Google's agency whisperer Jitendra Kumar🔒 - Hightouch hired 20-year Google veteran Jitendra Kumar as its first head of commercial for advertising, tasked with building partnerships with big agencies and brands.
LinkedIn says its AI slop button is working - The platform's "seems like AI slop" button has been used over a million times. LinkedIn says posts flagged as slop are getting 40% fewer views. Users will soon get notified when their own posts get flagged.
That’s It For This Week 👋
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