When We Wrote About Streaming Last January, We Made a Bet. The 2025 Numbers Decided.

In our January 2025 retrospective on distribution models, we made a specific call. AVOD and FAST platforms, we wrote, "continue growing as alternatives to SVOD, but face sustainability questions due to fragmented revenue streams." Sixteen months later, the question is answered. Free streaming services pulled in $4.9 billion of revenue in 2024 and grew viewing hours 43% year over year. The fragmentation is real. It is also, increasingly, where the growth lives.

This is what the 2024 to 2025 revenue data says about where the streaming money actually moved, and what it means for any distribution operation built on the assumptions of the SVOD era.

SVOD: still huge, increasingly opaque

At the top of the streaming pyramid, the absolute numbers remain enormous. Netflix passed 300 million paid subscribers globally and then, at the end of 2024, stopped reporting subscriber numbers altogether. Disney's combined Disney+ and Hulu subscriber base sits at 195.7 million. Warner Bros. Discovery's Max generated $2.65 billion in quarterly direct-to-consumer revenue, with global ARPU at $7.44. Apple TV+ and Prime Video, holding hundreds of millions more viewers between them, do not publicly disclose at all.

The pattern matters more than any single number. Subscriber growth is plateauing across the board, ARPU is regional and volatile, and the platforms have stopped competing on disclosure. When Netflix announced it would no longer report subscriber metrics, that was not a footnote. It was a tell. The growth story inside SVOD has migrated to ad-supported tiers (Netflix Ads, Disney+ Ads, Prime ad-supported), which are themselves increasingly indistinguishable from AVOD by another name.

In our earlier post on the insatiable demand for content, we argued that streaming platforms had locked themselves into a content arms race they could not afford to slow down. That argument has aged well. What it underestimated was how quickly the platforms would diversify their monetization model to keep paying for it.

AVOD and FAST: smaller pool, moving fast

Below the SVOD layer, the picture is louder. Free streaming services, the bucket that includes AVOD platforms (Tubi, Pluto TV) and FAST platforms (The Roku Channel, Samsung TV Plus, Freevee), reached $4.9 billion in revenue in 2024. The category is on a trajectory to $9 billion by 2029. The broader global FAST market is forecast to grow from approximately $10.6 billion in 2025 to $12.23 billion in 2026.