Streaming services are a part of most people's life by now. Their global expansion was most certainly can be considered as a miracle because the most common streaming service provider Netflix itself increased its subscriber number more than eightfold in just some years. It went up from 21.5 million in 2011 to 192 million in 2020. This puts Netflix to account for about one-third of all online video streaming. Netflix is not the only provider that had a user explosion though Hulu, Disney Plus, Amazon Prime, Apple TV all reached tens of millions of users in mere months. Disney Plus broke a record on this list by gaining its first 10 million users on the launch day and gaining another 18 million users after three months as stated by corporate officials. People are not subscribing to just one of these services either, the average user has subscriptions to 3 streaming services. Another statistic also tells us that more households subscribe to video streaming services rather than pay for TV in the US in 2020 for the first time ever. Millennials and Gen Z are the biggest contributors to this rise as 88 percent of Millennials and 80 percent of Gen Z in the US have streaming service subscriptions yet the percentage of people that watch TV in these generations is 51 percent for Millennials and 57 percent for Gen Z. We have to look at the advantages that streaming service providers in general hold against other sources of movie or TV content providers to understand this situation.

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Firstly as in the name, streaming itself is a big advantage. They allow you to start watching the video before downloading the full file and even though this is not an advantage against letting us say cinema or TV, it is a really important factor against other methods of online watching. It should be stated before online streaming services, online watching was mostly were illegally done. This included torrenting which is still very popular and illegal sites that uploaded shows without the consent of the publisher network. These sites relied mostly on pop-ups or ad revenues for their income and along with torrents they sometimes had virus links. These pop-ups and virus links led many people to stop using these sites and start using streaming services when they came out as they were sick of dealing with these problems every time they wanted to watch their favorite shows.

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Secondly, people's desire to switch from TV to online streaming is a bit different from a stop using other forms of online watching yet still has a few similarities. Mainly these reasons are incredibly long ad breaks, lack of original content, and the costs of TV. People also find streaming services easier to use and they think it has much more availability. Below is a statistic of a research conducted by Nielsen Total Audience Report where they asked random people what attributes of online streaming services that they hold important.