Image: Saturday Night Live, NBC
The release of new content is crucial for every SVOD platform. New seasons, episodes, and shows help keep audiences engaged and maintain the buzz around a platform. However, releasing new content comes with costs, and platforms have different strategies for balancing old and new content.
Some platforms, as the chart below shows, rely heavily on new content. Peacock has over one-third of its total TV catalog demand coming from shows that released new episodes in 2024, followed by Paramount+ with 29.6%. These figures are impressive, considering these shows make up only 13% of each platform's TV catalog.
Specifically, the top shows on Peacock’s catalog are titles with continuously released episodes, like “WWE Monday Night Raw,” “Saturday Night Live,” and “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” as well as long-running shows like the “Law & Order” franchise. All of these shows originate from NBC or networks owned by NBCUniversal.
On the other hand, Netflix and Disney+ had the lowest share of shows released in 2024. Nearly 60% of their TV catalog demand in 2024 came from series that released their last episodes before 2023. Netflix's catalog includes several legacy shows that ended long ago, such as “The Walking Dead,” “Breaking Bad,” and “Seinfeld.” Disney+ features “Gravity Falls,” “Mickey Mouse Clubhouse,” and “Star Wars: The Clone Wars,” all of which ended before 2023.
Apple TV+ exhibits a distinct pattern. Half of its TV demand comes from shows that released their last episodes in 2023, including “Ted Lasso” and “Severance,” two of its most popular shows. Apple TV+, which began releasing original shows in 2019, has a catalog almost entirely made up of originals. The platform has fewer shows ending before 2023 than the other platforms, with 40% of its catalog ending in 2023. This is significantly higher than other platforms, where this share ranges between 14% and 22%.
Besides the appeal of novelty, shows that ended before 2023 hold a safe spot in the audience's minds. One-third of the top 100 TV series in the US this year haven’t released an episode since 2022. HBO’s “Game of Thrones” is the most popular of these, and the second most in-demand show in the first half of the year. This demonstrates that when a network creates a hit, it can continue to yield benefits for years (maybe decades) to come.
