New research lays out streaming services' best defense against churn

PORTSMOUTH, N.H. — New research indicates that in the streaming subscription businesses, not all subscribers are equally valuable. According to Hub Entertainment Research’s “Decoding the Default” 2026 study, the more engaged users are, the more likely they are to stay and the less likely they are to churn and drop subscriptions.

This has important implications for the problem of subscribers churning in and out of subscriptions, which increases marketing and retention costs.

The HUB researchers found that the clearest signal of that engagement is whether a viewer considers a service their default, which is to say it is the service they turn on first when they want to watch something.

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