HBO's Max Cancels the Most Shows Among Streaming Services, Study Shows

An anonymous reader shares a report: The Streaming Era began with a promise of nurturing shows without fear of ratings pressure and quick cancellations. Of course, that was a lark. Soon enough, the streamers began slashing shows as quickly and brutally as any Nielsen-obsessed broadcaster, and they were all flooded with same complaint: "The streamers just cancel everything! Nothing gets more than a season anymore!" How true is that really? After all, the streamers are looking for hit shows, just like traditional networks. If a show gets high viewership relative to the cost of producing it, it gets renewed. Otherwise, it is canceled. That is how it has worked since the days of black-and-white TV. To get to the heart of the matter, Variety Intelligence Platform (VIP+) and Luminate collaborated on a data exploration to determine how often the leading U.S.-based streaming and linear programmers have canceled series TV series over the past three years. The new report, "The Show Must Go Off," is an exhaustive statistical analysis that aims to settle one of the most hotly contested debates in the TV industry. The data covered all shows (scripted and unscripted) canceled between 2020 and Aug. 8, 2023. The major streamers (Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, Amazon Prime Video, Max, Apple TV+, Peacock, Paramount+) overall had a combined average cancellation rate of 12.2% -- not much higher than linear TV (10.8%), but less than half of broadcast TV alone over that period. Warner Bros. Discovery-owned Max (formerly HBO Max) was by far the most brutal when it comes to cancelling shows, coming in at 26.9%.

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