There are over a hundred streaming services available here in the US and I'm gonna rank all of them in a tier list.
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A hundred, you heard that right.
One hundred, 100, a Benjamin.
Some of them are free.
Some of them are paid.
All of them want your eyeballs like some witch in the woods hoping for the final ingredient in her eternal youth portion.
Wow.
Quarantine is really making my imagination going overdrive.
Anyway, I thought it would be fun to make a tier list of all 100 or so streaming services.
So, let's put all the logos up on the door.
Holy [UNKNOWN], that's a lot of logos.
Let's get to work.
First things first, here are the rules.
Each service will be given zero to 10 points in five different categories.
Price, Originals back catalogue, variety and accessibility.
As a side note, I decided to score originals only by quantity, not by quality because really, one man's tiger king is another man's love is blind and you don't know which one's the bad one in that sentence.
It's well point proved.
Get a busket.
Once the scores are calculated each service will be placed into its appropriate tier 1 to 10 points is F tier 11 to 20 an E 21 to 30 a D 31 to 35 a C 36 to 40 a B 41 to 45 an A and 46 to 50 reaches the coveted S tier insert Angel music here.
That's a lot of numbers to throw at you.
So here's an example YouTube tv earns a one on price because it's $50 a month.
Ouch.
Then you get access to YouTube originals which let's give that five on top of that.
You have a large back catalog of on-demand content because of the TV aspect of it.
So we can give that an eight, and it'll of course earn tens for both variety, which YouTube TV has a lot of, and accessibility.
Because you can pretty much find it on any device under the sun.
That's a grand total of 34 points, placing it squarely in seats here.
Now that you know how I've decided to score all these, let's start moving large chunks of services into some of these lower tiers.
Fortunately for all of these services, not a single One landed all the way down and aft here and that's because of device compatibility.
These services all came prepared with your basic bases covered, Roku, Apple TV, Fire TV, iOS, Android setups which kept them all out of Good job guys.
Now let's talk about niche here and why a lot of niche services ended up here.
So any niche service by its own design is not made for everybody.
Therefore it won't ever score high enough to reach those upper echelons of our tier list.
That means you'll see your usual suspects here like history vault from geeks which are specifically tailored to a certain audience but and this is a little spicy.
It also scoops up a lot of the single sports services, NFL, NHL Va MLB and so on and so forth.
I am sorry sports fans but there is just not enough variety there.
They suffered in two particular categories and that's what kept them all the way down in a tier one is price because these single sport services can be really expensive, around 40 bucks a month in some cases, which kept them kind of on the lower end of scoring on price.
And then on top of that, variety is always a problem because it's a single sport and honestly, I could not weigh a single sport service any differently than say a service that only plays Broadway shows which exists by the way Broadway to D Who knew by that logic and by that scoring of that place is 26 different services down in each year.
That's about a quarter of our list.
Now let's do the same with dates here, which by the way has the most amount of streaming services.
Out of any tier in this list.
These are the kinds of services that can be really appealing, but usually have a couple of caveats here and there if you're interested in subscribing to them, and they really kinda have to be for you.
For example follows scored 26 points in this tier, they got a seven on price they got a zero for originals they follow doesn't make their own original content.
They got a five on back catalogue and a seven on variety because fellow has a very specific niche that it's filling.
It doesn't have.
cable news channels, sports channels, local channels, but it does have a lot of entertainment and lifestyle services so we can give them a five and a seven there and then a seven on accessibility Overall 38 services landed here indeed here.
Most of these have, again, one of those big caveats.
They don't make their own originals or they don't have a lot of variety.
They're sort of niche services or skinny bundles that are missing some of the bigger components of those higher tier services.
Wow, that is Two thirds of our list just about and I'm sorry, I agreed really tough.
This is a tough competition.
It's a platform, a platform world out there people deal with it.
Alright, moving on to seats here.
This is the tier where we start seeing a lot of the more well known ones.
Services out there and they'll still have a couple of sort of like, Ooh, that might not be for me aspects to them, but overall, they're very good services.
Here's what a lot of them have in common low or free price points, larger back catalogs and tons of variety.
For example, crackle Pluto TV and stars all landed in seats here, along with 20 other services.
I already mentioned YouTube TV on what it scored Apple TV plus is kind of in a weird place.
It doesn't quite make it The cut on the upper tiers, it doesn't have a huge expanded library, there's not a bunch of back catalogue of video on demand options except for their originals.
So it kind of landed right in the middle, and then you see stuff like Sling TV, which are sort of these skinny bundles that are pretty good but they're also expensive.
So again, much like YouTube TV kind of lands.
Somewhere in the middle.
At this point, we have 13 services left.
So let's see who made it into beats here.
These are services that are really awesome but usually had one limiting factor or were sort of high averages across the board.
ESPN plus almost had it all great price point.
Excellent back catalogue.
Good originals.
Hello 3430 documentaries.
Have you and also super accessible across a bunch of platforms but in the variety category, even though it's scored higher than the single sport streaming platforms, it's still only sports or sports related.
So Got dinged just a tiny bit there and kept it out of that A and S tier acorn TV suffered a very similar fate here.
It's all catered toward British television British content.
So there's not a ton of variety but because it does cross genres, you can have British comedy or British drama.
So on so forth, it did score a little bit higher there.
So it ended up in the same tier as ESPN plus, but for the same reason, sort of like just a small limited bit of variety ding there kept it from those ANS tier.
Showtime and epics are those two that sort of scored high averages across the board landed them in beats here.
Not really anything to kind of go crazy about an arrest here but they did well enough to land them up in the higher tiers so good for them.
Who would live to be actually sort of really really well in just about every category but at $55 a month?
It's such an expensive option that that price score has to just shy everything [UNKNOWN] So Sorry, Hulu TV.
It was a really tough one to keep you down in beat here, but I had to do it.
Lastly, peacock is here which their service doesn't officially roll out to everyone until July 2020.
And I scored them based on that availability.
Not the Comcast only soft launch they're doing right now.
And maybe, just maybe we'll see peacock in a higher tier next year.
We're down to just seven services.
At this point the criticism is so finally pointed.
I mean, one little tiny nitpick could keep a service out of s tier.
So these are all Excellent services.
You cannot go wrong by any of them, really.
It just depends on what you want.
But here we go, let's talk about [INAUDIBLE] Disney+.
Disney+ is great for families.
I mean, and they're original slate is pretty good so far.
I love The Imagineering Story, I love the.
Lorien obviously who doesn't but at the end of the day, Disney plus is a service made for families and it is very focused on having family friendly content only which holds it back just a little bit in the variety category.
So I'm really sorry Disney plus, like you're gonna either have to start putting R rated movies on your service, which I don't see happening or you're never going to make it an S tier.
You're gonna have to deal with that.
You'd have to sit here and a tear and think about what you've done.
Which is provide nice content for families guess that's all right.
CBS all access.
Okay, so full disclosure here legally, I'm required to tell you.
That c|net's parent company is in fact Viacom CBS which also owns CBS all access and there are actually other services in this list that are also part of the Viacom CBS family like Pluto TV.
Showtime, there's probably more.
I don't even know.
This is a big company, okay?
I have no idea.
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All I know, is that we're now part of the family that owns RuPaul's Drag Race.
It's definitely more than two.
Now that we've gotten that out of the way, let's talk about CBS All Access.
It is, objectively, a good service.
There's Pretty big back catalogue, there's a live TV component.
It's relatively cheap and there are a slate of originals like Picard and the Twilight Zone available, if you are so inclined.
So it actually scored really high on the list.
I was.
Kinda surprised but also not surprised because, a lot of people really like those originals and CBS all access has a live TV component which broke its tie with peacock and nudged it up into a tear and now we come to HBO.
So this was very weird.
To rank because HBO NOW is the current iteration of the way to get standalone HBO it's 15 bucks a month.
You get all the HBO originals succession Westworld, blah, blah, blah.
And then Warner media will be launching HBO max at the end of May and it will include all of the things you get with HBO NOW.
And also original content from studios that Warner media owns Warner Brothers, DC all of those things are extras they're going to be doing these Max originals with franchises like Looney Tunes.
So.
It cost the exact same amount as HBO NOW, which made it really weird sort of like rank them as separate entities because I have a feeling at some point in the next let's say calendar year Warner media is probably going to merge these services, which means they scored almost exactly the same With the exception of originals which HBO max ended up getting a couple extra points in because it's making these max originals, so that kept it one point shy of s tier but generally speaking HBO Now HBO max right in the same category.
They're in a tier both excellent options for you.
I guess I would say if you're gonna pay $15 a month, it seems like you wanna go with Max.
I don't know.
That leaves our final 3 services which all landed in need.
They covered it [UNKNOWN].
Yes Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime Video are our champions.
The best of the best, the cream of the crop.
These companies spend billions of dollars in developing original content.
The have massive Catalogues they have tons of variety.
They're literally available on every platform under the sun and they have good cheap entry level price points, all great things.
Not a single one of these services scored any less than eight.
In every single freaking category, the top scoring service amazon prime video.
Got an eight in price and 10s across the board in originals, back catalogue ,variety and accessibility for a grand total of 48 points, just to shop of perfect.
Chances are you're already.
Already subscribe, to at least one of these S-tier services?
Or at least you're borrowing the password of someone who does, we just ranked over 100, streaming services.
Good for us internet.
My god.
I almost forgot we have a challenge for you.
CNET is doing this really cool thing where we're giving you a coin budget and challenging you to create the perfect streaming package.
Come over and play with us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, you can find CNET on all those platforms and we'll have a really good time.
Tell us what do you want spend your money on.
I think it'd be really great to see all of your Perfect streaming platform setups and until next time, wash your hands and be good humans.
