by 13%. The division achieved its first double-digit quarterly operating margin at 10.6%, putting Disney on track to deliver an SVOD margin of at least 10% for the full financial year. Tom Price, director of content distribution at Roku, says the next phase will bring sustained rather than explosive expansion. “In the future, all TV will be streamed. We’re not there yet, so that means streaming will continue to grow. It’s not sudden, but it’s relentless year after year. We’ll keep seeing more hours streamed, but not through an explosion of new services like we saw in the last few years.” The picture also varies geographically. Anurag Tyagi, founder of OTTASIA, comments that treating slower expansion in the US and UK as evidence of a universal ceiling overlooks considerable headroom elsewhere. “India, Southeast Asia and the Gulf are still adding new streamers by the million,” he explains. “The west hit its own ceiling and decided that was the ceiling for everyone.” “A smaller, highly engaged audience that stays longer and can be monetised effectively through both subscriptions and advertising can be far more valuable than a large but transient subscriber base,” says Mary Gabrielyan, chief strategy officer at AI Digital. Retention begins before the cancellation screen Retention has become critical because streaming customers are price-conscious and comfortable moving between services. Deloitte found that 39% of US consumers had cancelled at least one paid SVOD service during the preceding six months in 2025. The figure exceeded 50% among Gen Z and Millennials. Approximately 24% had cancelled and then rejoined the same service. This ‘churn and return’ pattern shows how consumers increasingly assemble temporary subscription portfolios around particular programmes, films or sports seasons. The cancellation screen is the end of the retention process, not its beginning. Earlier warning signs include fewer logins, abandoned searches, longer time-to-play, buffering, failed payments and increased support contact. Donald Res, chief solutions officer and co-founder at Cleeng, tells FEED that AI-based risk scoring can identify vulnerable subscribers between 30 and 90 days before departure. Payment recovery is another overlooked opportunity. According to Res, smart retries, account updater services and dunning campaigns can typically recover 60-70% of failed payments, addressing a significant source of involuntary churn. “The tactic should always match the driver,” Res explains. “Reaching for a discount regardless of cause is the most common mistake we see; it treats every churn signal the same way when the fixes are quite different.” A household encountering billing friction needs a simpler payment journey, while someone suffering playback failures needs the technical problem resolved. Blanket discounts may defer cancellation, but they can also undermine pricing. Roku’s Price says content variety can turn a temporary subscriber into a lasting one. “People who are only in a service for one title are often most at risk. Once they’re
watching a range of content, they’re far less likely to leave. The intervention can come earlier by getting customers engaged with a variety of content, not just the one show that brought them in.” Platforms must also examine unsuccessful intent. Tyagi argues that an early sign of churn is not what a customer watches but what they cannot find. Someone who searches repeatedly, receives no useful result and closes the application may have psychologically left long before cancelling. Retention consequently depends on integrated data. Playback, billing, marketing, search and support systems often hold separate versions of the customer relationship. Connecting them enables providers to distinguish between technical, financial and content-driven disengagement and to respond appropriately. Discovery becomes the new content battleground Content remains streaming’s essential product, but catalogue scale has lost some of its power as a differentiator. Around 41% of consumers surveyed by
PROFITABLE STREAMING Disney’s Entertainment SVOD business generated operating income of $582m in the second quarter of 2026, up 88% year on year
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