Insights and Trends Archives

The TV Thriller Correction: Thriller Shows Lost Half Their Top 10 Presence in a Year

By David Markowitz | July 27, 2026

Bar chart titled The thriller correction happened on TV, not in movies, comparing thriller genre appearances in H1 2025 versus H1 2026. Thriller shows on the weekly shows Top 10 fall from 122 appearances to 56, labeled minus 54 percent. Thriller movies on the weekly movies Top 10 hold at 131 versus 132, labeled flat. Source: Reelgood Weekly Streaming Top 10, US.

Thriller appearances on Reelgood’s weekly TV shows Top 10 fell from 122 in H1 2025 to 56 in H1 2026, a 54% decline. Movie thrillers didn’t move. Television thrillers just went through a correction, and the chart’s biggest genre never flinched: Drama held 167 of 260 overall Top 10 spots in H1 2025 and 168…

Doctors, Small Towns, and Relationships: What’s Winning Streaming’s Top 10 in 2026

By David Markowitz | July 20, 2026

Bar chart comparing gaining Top 10 tag appearances in H1 2025 versus H1 2026. Relationships rises from 41 spots to 61, workplace from 24 to 37, secluded-locations from 21 to 33, small-town from 4 to 20, friendship from 9 to 18, and doctor from 4 to 16. Source: Reelgood Weekly Streaming Top 10, US.

The relationships tag rose from 41 to 61 of the 260 spots in Reelgood’s weekly overall Top 10 year over year, spread across 26 different titles. The stories replacing streaming’s fading political thrillers have personal stakes: relationships, workplaces, friendships, and small towns. That’s the second finding from comparing H1 2026 against H1 2025 in Reelgood’s…

Politics Fell Out of Streaming’s Top 10: The Biggest Thematic Decline of 2026

By David Markowitz | July 16, 2026

Bar chart comparing declining Top 10 tag appearances in H1 2025 versus H1 2026. Government-and-politics falls from 41 spots to 18, detectives-and-investigation from 44 to 27, identity-and-growth from 33 to 10, wealth-and-privilege from 26 to 15, social-inequality from 18 to 0, and technology from 14 to 4. Source: Reelgood Weekly Streaming Top 10, US.

Titles tagged government-and-politics held 41 of the 260 spots in Reelgood’s weekly overall Top 10 in the first half of 2025. In the first half of 2026, they held 18. Streaming’s political moment is over. That’s the clearest finding from comparing the first half of 2026 against the first half of 2025 in Reelgood’s weekly…

FAST Viewing Grew 55%. Metadata Quality Now Decides What Gets Discovered

By David Markowitz | July 14, 2026

Graphic titled "This is the depth behind a single title," showing one complete Reelgood title record for Snowpiercer (2020 Series): poster artwork, descriptive facts (type, released date, status, runtime, rating, language, markets), a synopsis, creator/director/composer credits, genres, ML taxonomy tags, cast (67 billed), production companies, episode-level metadata (4 seasons, 40 episodes, with each episode carrying season, episode, title, synopsis and air date), and cross-system identifiers (Reelgood, IMDb, EIDR, and Wikidata, with ID values shortened). Footer notes the catalog covers 4M+ titles across 300+ services and 25+ countries, cleaned and normalized, refreshed twice daily.

FAST viewing grew 55% year over year. The systems that decide which of those titles anyone actually finds are choking on bad metadata. Both facts come from the same place: Amagi’s June 2026 AIRTIME Report, which pairs that 55% jump in viewing hours and a 53% rise in ad impressions with a warning from the…

Rights Windows Say What Should Happen. Streaming Availability Data Shows What Did.

By David Markowitz | July 6, 2026

Reelgood historical availability timeline for Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning in the United States, 2025 to 2026. Horizontal bars show each service's streaming window: Prime Video, Paramount+, and MGM+ under SVOD; Apple TV Store and Fandango at Home under Buy / Rent; DIRECTV Stream and fuboTV under vMVPD. Windows begin and end at different points across the timeline.

A studio’s compliance team recently walked me through how they confirm a licensed title came down when its window closed. The process: someone opens the platform, searches for the title, and checks whether it is still there. If a partner was supposed to have pulled a title last quarter, they send an acknowledgment letter and…

Every Streaming Service Has a Fingerprint. Do You Know Yours?

By David Markowitz | June 24, 2026

Genre identity heatmap showing genre share as a percent of total catalog across major and mid-tier streamers. HBO Max Documentary above 40%, Disney+ Comedy 41% and Family 52%, BritBox Documentary 51% with Drama 39% and Crime 27%, and AMC+ Horror nearly equal to Drama. Source: Reelgood streaming availability data, June 2026.

A streaming platform we work with spent months struggling to explain what made its service different. The marketing team had theories. None of them stuck. Then it ran its catalog through Reelgood’s data and found something it had never noticed: it held the largest horror library of any major streamer. Nobody internally had framed the…

New Releases Drive Library Demand. Availability Data Reveals the Missed Licensing Windows.

By David Markowitz | June 21, 2026

Grid titled "Great Titles, Not Streaming Anywhere" showing nine films with their TVOD-only availability periods: Inception (29 days), Office Space (274 days), Cape Fear (238/59 days), Oppenheimer (290 days), E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (93 days), 28 Days Later (92 days), Gone Girl (143 days), Lord of the Flies (212 days), and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (458 days). Source: Reelgood availability data, April 2026.

Library demand spikes when new titles release. Streaming availability data is how licensing teams catch those windows before they close. Oppenheimer won Best Picture in March 2024. For 290 days – and counting, it hasn’t been available on any SVOD or AVOD streaming service. That’s not a rare anomaly. Across Reelgood’s availability database, major titles…

What Streaming Buyers Are Actually Acquiring: How to Read Catalog Changes for Licensing and Sales

By David Markowitz | June 9, 2026

Reelgood bar chart of the largest year-over-year genre changes across major streaming catalogs, 2025 to 2026, showing gains and declines by service.

Over the past few months I have sat in on a string of conversations with content strategy, acquisition, and sales leaders at production companies and independent distributors. The companies could not have been more different: a Canadian studio selling scripted series into Europe, a mid-size studio building a slate for underrepresented audiences, an indie distributor…

Why The Devil Wears Prada Is on Both Disney+ and HBO Max Right Now

By David Markowitz | May 26, 2026

A dark navy chart titled "Historical Title Availability" showing streaming availability windows for The Devil Wears Prada (2006) across SVOD and AVOD services in the United States, from 2021 through May 2026. SVOD services listed include STARZ, Hulu, Prime Video, Peacock, HBO Max, Cinemax, and Disney+. AVOD services include The Roku Channel, Tubi, and Freevee. Each service is displayed as a horizontal row with colored bars indicating when the title was available. HBO Max shows the longest continuous window (November 2023 to February 2025), with a current active window beginning April 2026. Disney+ and HBO Max are currently streaming the title as of today. Data sourced from Reelgood Streaming Intelligence, US only.

Key Takeaways Studio ownership is not a reliable proxy for streaming availability. Library titles routinely appear on multiple competing SVOD services at the same time because pre-existing licensing arrangements typically survive major M&A activity. A title’s full streaming footprint frequently includes channel add-ons and routing variants that are distinct from a host service’s standalone catalog.…

Stand-Up Comedy Is Streaming’s Most Underrated Content Strategy

By David Markowitz | May 22, 2026

Horizontal bar chart comparing stand-up comedy movies as a percentage of total movie catalog across seven major streaming platforms. Paramount+ leads at 11.5%, followed by Netflix at 10.8%, HBO Max at 6.5%, Hulu at 3.3%, Amazon Prime Video at 3.0%, Peacock at 1.9%, and Disney+ at 0.1%. Source: Reelgood, May 2026.

Netflix has added nearly 200 stand-up comedy movies to its catalog since 2020. Stand-up now accounts for 10.8% of every movie available on the platform, up from 8.0% six years ago. The Roast of Kevin Hart landed at #9 in Reelgood’s Streaming Top 10 for the week of May 14-20, 2026. It was the only…