Hundreds of streaming services and nothing to watch

“Fifty-seven channels, and nothin’ on.”

Bruce Springsteen famously said those words during a concert and later in a song in the 1990s about the number of TV channels seemingly growing disproportionately to the availability of enjoyable content.

Within a few years, there would be hundreds of TV channels and still, some would argue in hyperbolic frustration, “nothing to watch.”

The advent of streaming services was poised as a potential solution to this problem. It granted viewers easy, on-demand access to thousands of movies and shows, which, theoretically, could ensure that viewers could always find something to watch.

According to a survey from Nielsen’s Gracenote, though, that’s not exactly the case today.

Gracenote, a Nielsen-owned content data business, surveyed 3,000 video streaming users in the US, Brazil, France, Germany, Mexico, and the UK who were at least 18 years old for its “2026 State of Play: Amid fragmentation frustrations, UX is the future of streaming” report. It found that many struggle to find something to stream. However, this is not necessarily because there’s nothing good on, but rather because they find it difficult to home in on good content on streaming services.

For example, over 51 percent of respondents said that “the abundance of content and [streaming] services is making it harder to find something to watch.”

Further, 19.2 percent of respondents said that, on average, they either “always” or “often” don’t know what to watch, can’t find anything, and then decide to do something else. And 27.4 percent of respondents said that, on average, they either always or often try to watch a specific program but end up not watching it because they couldn’t find it on streaming.

“Through the lens of catalogue size and streaming usage, connecting the 83.4 percent who don’t always know what they want to watch should be fairly straightforward, especially as companies increasingly use customer data to create personalized experiences that foster long-term engagement and loyalty. Audiences, however, aren’t finding what they’re looking for, and content discovery challenges are mounting,” the report reads.