There were 366 standalone streaming services in the US in 2022. Today there are 336. Ten more folded in the second quarter of this year alone, mostly absorbed into bigger platforms through mergers and rebrands rather than shutting down outright. The pattern behind the numbers is consistent: fewer, larger platforms, buying up or absorbing the smaller ones around them.
None of that is really news if you've been paying attention. What's worth talking about is what it means for anyone whose work depends on where it lives.
What's actually happening
The streaming business is consolidating hard. Big platforms are merging with each other, folding smaller standalone services into bigger bundles, and getting more selective about what content and which creators make the cut. It's not really about any one company's decision. It's a structural shift: as the market matures, the buyer pool for content gets smaller and the remaining platforms compete on scale, not variety.
For a big studio with an established slate, that's a negotiation. For everyone else, whether you run a channel, work on a single film, or just have footage you care about, it can mean the platform hosting your work today gets folded into something else tomorrow, on someone else's timeline, for reasons that have nothing to do with you or your video.
Why that pressure doesn't reach us
Long Play was never trying to win that race. There's no licensing strategy to be picked for, no acquisition pipeline deciding whose content makes the next platform's launch slate, no ad business that needs to keep growing to justify a merger. We're not competing for the same seat at the table the big platforms are consolidating around, so the thing currently reshuffling that part of the industry doesn't have much to reshuffle here.
That's not a boast. It's just a different premise. You don't need a following, a studio, or a strategy to belong here. If you own a video and want it preserved online as well as it possibly can be, that's what Long Play is for, full stop. Put it somewhere you actually control, watch it play back properly, and know it's still going to be there next year without having to guess whether the platform itself will still exist in its current form. That's the whole job. It doesn't scale up or down with who's buying whom this quarter.
What actually changes, and what doesn't
Formats change. Audience habits change. We'll keep adapting to both, the same way we always have. What doesn't move is the basic promise: your videos, your ownership, real notice if anything ever changes, and a working export any time you want one. That's covered in detail in our Permanence Pledge, and it's the same commitment whether the wider industry is consolidating, expanding, or doing something nobody's predicted yet.
The honest version of "why we're not going anywhere" isn't a claim that nothing could ever happen to us. It's that we built this around a much smaller, steadier job than the one currently getting reshuffled around us, and a smaller job is a lot easier to keep doing well for a long time.
Read more about what we actually promise and the principles behind it.