By Aidan Sowa, CEO and Founder, Frontier Industries | October 2026
Television used to announce its winners in the morning paper. The Nielsen ratings arrived, everyone read the same number, and an argument could at least begin from shared facts. Streaming abolished the shared fact. Your service now grades its own homework in public, and the press has learned to discount accordingly. Choosing a PR agency in this market means choosing who will make your claims believable. This guide uses the published measurement and churn data to frame that choice, then sets out how to test an agency before you trust it with your numbers.
44.8 percent: streaming share of US TV viewing, May 2025, a record (Nielsen, 2025) 5.3 percent: monthly gross churn, premium SVOD, September 2024 (Antenna, 2024) 147.8 million: cancellations across nine premium US services in 2024 (Antenna, 2025)
I Discrimen
A stream is not a story
Every platform can count a stream. Almost none can make a stream mean something.
This is the distinction your agency decision turns on. A launch generates viewing spikes for almost any heavily promoted title. The press, your competitors and your own board have learned this, so raw hours viewed now persuade nobody who was not already persuaded. What persuades is context: growth against the market, retention after the launch window, and a catalogue story that explains why subscribers should stay in the months with no tentpole.
The agency you need is the one that can build that context honestly and place it where investors, advertisers and talent representatives actually read. The agency you do not need is the one offering to make every release sound like a phenomenon. The market has heard phenomenon too often, and it has started charging for the word.
In streaming, the product is habit. Publicity that cannot speak to habit is theatre performed for an audience of journalists who no longer applaud on cue.
Your numbers are the claim. Your agency is the evidence.
II Machina
The publicity machine now answers to the churn dashboard
Broadcast publicity served the schedule. Streaming publicity serves retention, and retention is a monthly verdict. Antenna (2024) put gross churn across premium SVOD at 5.3 percent in September 2024, with net churn of 3.1 percent once returning subscribers are counted. A service of any scale loses a meaningful city of customers every month and must replace them before it can grow.
That arithmetic reorganises the agency's job. Content publicity becomes acquisition spending by other means, judged on sign ups driven in launch windows. Library publicity, anniversary stories, genre collections and talent profiles, becomes retention work, reminding subscribers why the service is worth keeping in the quiet weeks when cancellation is one thumb press away.
Antenna (2025) counted 173.3 million gross additions against 147.8 million cancellations across the top nine US services in 2024. The gap between those numbers is the entire growth story of the industry. Your agency should be able to discuss that gap fluently, title by title, and tell you which of your releases actually moved it.
Ask candidates a blunt question: which of our last four launches would you have publicised differently, and what would you have measured? Firms that answer in coverage volume have not understood your business. Firms that answer in acquisition and retention terms have.
Notice, too, what their answer assumes about your catalogue. A launch is a door, but the room behind it is the back catalogue the new subscriber discovers in week two. Publicity that sells only the premiere and ignores the library behind it wastes the most expensive attention in your business, the kind you have already paid to acquire.
III Exemplum
The fight that explained the model
In November 2024, Netflix staged a live boxing event between Jake Paul and Mike Tyson. Antenna (2024) recorded 1.43 million sign ups in the three day window around the fight, one of five programming events that year to drive more than a million sign ups in three days. The Super Bowl on Paramount Plus drew 3.20 million in its window. Two exclusive NFL games on Peacock drew 4.21 million combined.
Read those numbers the way your board does. A single event, correctly chosen and loudly publicised, can outperform a quarter of brand advertising. Live moments have become streaming's front door, and publicity is the work of making the moment unavoidable before it happens and undeniable afterwards.
The lesson for agency selection is precise. The value was not created by a press release on fight week. It was created by months of narrative construction, the legitimacy argument, the nostalgia argument, the spectacle argument, each placed with different press. Ask any agency pitching you to dissect one of these events and explain which parts of the coverage were engineered and which were luck. Their honesty about the ratio is a proxy for their competence.
IV Damnum
Opacity is a tax you pay on every announcement
Streaming's original sin was measurement secrecy, and the bill has arrived. Because platforms publish selective, self defined figures, journalists apply a discount to all of them, including yours on the days you are telling the plain truth.
Nielsen (2025) gave the market its shared context when The Gauge recorded streaming at 44.8 percent of US television viewing in May 2025, ahead of broadcast and cable combined for the first time. Third party measurement now frames every story, whether you participate or not. Services that refuse independent framing get framed anyway, usually by a competitor's better number.
The cost shows up in specific rooms. Advertisers pricing your ad tier ask what your reach really is. Talent representatives ask why your hit is invisible in the charts they trust. Journalists ask why your definition of a view changed since the last announcement. Each question is a small tax on credibility, and credibility taxes compound.
Your agency's task is to lower that tax: consistent definitions, third party data woven into your own, and charts published when they flatter you least as well as most. Choose the firm that proposes this discipline voluntarily. It is proposing to spend its own credibility on you, which is the strongest commitment an agency can make.
V Genus
The firms differ by what they measure
| Agency type | What it optimises | Blind spot | Right for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Content publicity specialist | Launch conversation and reviews | Subscriber economics | Services competing on originals |
| Corporate and investor communications firm | Market narrative, earnings context | Day to day title work | Listed or fundraising platforms |
| Consumer growth agency | Sign up spikes, social and creator buzz | Trade credibility | Challenger services buying growth |
| Data fluent hybrid | Both narrative and measurement defence | Rare and in demand | Mid size platforms at scale stage |
| General entertainment agency | Familiar playbook | Streaming specifics, churn and ad tiers | Few streaming companies now |
The hybrid row is the honest answer for most platforms, and the scarcest. Streaming sits between entertainment, technology and advertising, and an agency fluent in only one language will keep translating badly in the other two. Your launch story must satisfy a TV critic, a media buyer and a technology analyst in the same week.
Interrogate breadth directly. Ask who on the team has handled an earnings cycle, who has run a title launch, and who has briefed an advertising audience on ad tier measurement. If one person claims all three, you have found either a rare asset or a comfortable liar. References will tell you which.
One more test separates the fluent from the decorative. Ask how the firm would handle a password sharing crackdown: a policy your subscribers will experience as a price rise wearing a costume. The answer requires consumer empathy, investor framing and precise language about fairness, all in a single announcement. Agencies that have thought about enforcement communications before your meeting are agencies that read your industry's future rather than its trailer releases.
VI Partes
Segment your publics or lose them separately
A streaming service speaks to at least five publics whose interests routinely conflict. Subscribers want price stability and plentiful content. Advertisers want reach and measurement they can audit. Creators want prominence and honest reporting. Investors want growth and discipline. Regulators want competition and consumer fairness.
One narrative cannot serve all five, and attempts to make it do so produce the bland corporate voice that journalists quote only when something has gone wrong. A serious agency builds five registers of the same truth, consistent in fact, different in emphasis, and knows which register each outlet carries.
The price rise announcement is the acid test. To subscribers it must be value framed. To advertisers, audience framed. To investors, margin framed. To press, context framed against the market. Ask a pitching agency to draft the same announcement four ways, live, in your meeting. The exercise takes twenty minutes and tells you more than a month of credential polishing.
Segmentation also protects you in crisis. When an outage or a billing failure hits, the firm that already knows your five publics can move in five directions at once. The firm that knows only journalists will write a statement and watch the other four rooms fill with other people's versions.
VII Occasio
The bundle era rewards the well explained
The market's centre of gravity has shifted from conquest to combination. Antenna (2025) found the new Disney and Max bundle holding 80 percent of new subscribers through its first three months, the strongest retention in its comparisons. Bundles work because they raise the cost of leaving. They also complicate your story: your service must now be distinctive inside someone else's package.
That is a publicity problem of a new kind. The partner's channels will sell the bundle. Your agency must sell the reason your service is the bundle's irreplaceable part, the catalogue and the brand that make the combination worth keeping when the promotional price ends.
There is a parallel opening in advertising. Ad supported tiers accounted for 45 percent of premium subscriptions in 2024 on Antenna's count (2025), up from 36 percent in 2023, and advertisers are building real budgets behind them. Services with credible, third party friendly measurement stories will take a disproportionate share of both the budgets and the trade coverage that follows them.
Choose an agency that treats measurement as a story asset rather than a compliance burden. In this era, the best explained service wins money that the biggest library does not.
VIII Consilium
A scorecard for a measurement age
| Criterion | Weight | How to test it |
|---|---|---|
| Data literacy | 25 percent | Give them your last launch numbers, watch them reason |
| Multi public fluency | 20 percent | The four way announcement exercise, live |
| Launch craft | 20 percent | A past tentpole dissected honestly |
| Crisis speed | 15 percent | Outage and billing failure protocols, named staff |
| Advertising trade credibility | 10 percent | Media buyer references, not only journalists |
| Retention programming | 10 percent | A written quiet month plan for your service |
Contract against the dashboard, not the clipping book. Agree the measures at signature: sign up attribution in launch windows where your analytics allow it, branded search movement, share of conversation against two named rivals, and sentiment in the advertising trades. Review quarterly with the agency's principals in the room.
Also write the definitions down. What counts as a view, a completion and an active household in your public statements should be fixed in the contract's annex, so neither side is tempted to improve the arithmetic mid campaign. Credibility is a joint account. Protect it like one.
Production partners face a cousin of this problem, covered in the guide on television production companies, and the broader library in the industry resources places streaming among its neighbouring markets. The retained scope behind these questions is detailed under public relations services.
Questions platform teams ask
Why does our hit title get less press credit than a rival's smaller show?
Usually because the rival's numbers arrive with third party framing and yours arrive as self declared totals. Journalists are not accusing you of invention. They are rationing trust across an industry that trained them to. Fix the framing, with consistent definitions and independent data alongside yours, and the credit gap narrows within a couple of launches.
Should our agency handle both content publicity and corporate communications?
It can work, and for mid size platforms it often should, because the two stories constantly collide: a price rise is a consumer story and an investor story on the same day. The condition is staffing. Insist on named leads for each discipline. One team vaguely covering both is how platforms end up fluent in neither.
How do we publicise a price increase without triggering cancellations?
Lead with the value ledger: what arrived since the last rise, what is coming, and what the alternatives cost. Antenna (2024) showed net churn running far below gross churn, which means many cancellers return. Treat the announcement as a retention campaign, not a confession, and give your agency the data to argue the ledger in public.
What should we measure a streaming PR agency on?
Movement in the numbers your board already watches: attributed sign ups in launch windows, branded search, conversation share against named rivals, and the tone of your coverage in advertising and investor press. Clipping counts measure the agency's industry, not yours. If a firm resists dashboard measures, ask what it is protecting.
How fast must an agency move during a live event failure?
Minutes, with pre agreed lines. A failed stream during a marquee event is a story within the hour and a meme within two. Your contract should name the on call lead for live events, the holding statement library and who can approve an apology without waking three executives. Test the rota before you need it.
Do bundles change what we should ask of an agency?
Yes. Bundle partners share the customer relationship, so distinctiveness becomes the brief. Your agency must keep your brand separately famous inside a joint offer, and manage a partner's publicity team as collaborators rather than rivals. Ask candidates about co marketed launches specifically. The bundle era punishes services that become anonymous inside someone else's package.
When is a challenger service better served by a boutique?
When growth is the whole problem. A challenger needs sign up spikes, creator buzz and category definition more than it needs earnings polish. Boutiques with growth instincts outperform prestige firms at that stage. The mistake is keeping the boutique unchanged after scale arrives and the questions turn corporate.
How this guide was built
The churn, additions and bundle figures come from Antenna's State of Subscriptions research published in 2024 and 2025. The viewing share milestones come from Nielsen's The Gauge. The live event sign up examples are Antenna's published acquisition counts for named events. No platform's confidential data is used, and the four way announcement exercise is a selection method, not a report of any company's internal practice. Where this guide discusses measurement opacity, it describes a documented industry condition, not the conduct of a specific service.
IX Incipe
Choose the firm that makes your numbers believable
Streaming has finished its land grab and entered its credibility contest. The services that win the next phase will be the ones whose claims survive a journalist's second question, an advertiser's audit and an investor's model. Your agency is where that survival is built.
Frontier Industries helps platform and entertainment companies structure communications for this environment: launch strategy tied to acquisition, retention programming for quiet months, and measurement discipline that holds across all five of your publics. Meet us through the industries team page or begin directly.
Begin the conversation at https://industries.frontiercapitals.com/start-an-industry-campaign/ or by calling 401-219-4207.
Sources
1. Nielsen, Streaming Reaches Historic TV Milestone, The Gauge, May 2025: https://www.nielsen.com/news-center/2025/streaming-reaches-historic-tv-milestone-eclipses-combined-broadcast-and-cable-viewing-for-first-time/ 2. Antenna, State of Subscriptions Premium SVOD 2024, churn data via Setplex summary: https://setplex.com/resource-hub/ott-subscription-churn 3. MediaPost, Premium SVOD Subscribers Up 10.4 Percent in 2024, Antenna Year in Review: https://www.Mediapost.Com/publications/article/403675/premium-svod-subscribers-up-104-in-2024-average.html?edition= 4. Stream TV Insider, Premium SVOD Churn Finally Drops, Antenna State of Subscriptions: https://www.streamtvinsider.com/video/premium-svod-churn-finally-drops-its-still-sky-high 5. Antenna, State of Subscriptions Premium SVOD 2024 Year in Review, full report PDF: https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6756b521db09e280168a4cf3/67d441029339ef15aa72f5ae_Antenna%20x%20State%20of%20Subscriptions%20-%20Premium%20SVOD.pdf 6. CSI Magazine, Streaming Overtakes Cable and Broadcast Combined for First Time: https://www.csimagazine.com/csi/gauge-may25-historic-tv-milestone.php 7. Statista, Streaming Takes Over the TV Screen, Nielsen Gauge chart: https://www.statista.com/chart/35864/tv-consumption-in-the-us-by-platform/ 8. Adwave, What Share of TV Viewing Is Streaming, Q2 2025: https://adwave.com/resources/us-tv-viewing-share-streaming 9. Adwave, Which Streaming Service Has the Most Viewers, Q4 2025: https://adwave.com/resources/most-watched-streaming-service-q4-2025 10. Qwixter summary, How Bundling SVOD Services Reduces Subscriber Cancellations, Antenna findings: https://www.qwixter.com/2025/03/10/how-bundling-svod-services-reduces-subscriber-cancellations/