It’s been a two-year await the upcoming third season of HBO’s Home of the Dragon. The second season of Apple TV+’s Severance was a three-year wait, as was the ultimate season of Netflix’s Stranger Things.
At this level, ready years for a brand new season isn’t in any respect uncommon.
Based on a brand new examine by Ampere Analysis, the common wait between seasons of TV reveals on main streaming platforms has reached what is sort of actually an all-time excessive.
The examine studies the hole has step by step doubled over the past decade — from a mean of 10 months in 2016 to 16 months in 2021 to 21 months in 2024 and 2025. Previous to 2016, reveals taking lower than a yr to return have been the trade norm.
That mentioned, a present taking a very long time to return doesn’t essentially scale back curiosity. In actual fact, reveals that took greater than 30 months between seasons (akin to Netflix’s Wednesday) had the best viewer engagement.
Unsurprisingly, sci-fi and fantasy titles that require appreciable VFX work are typically the reveals which have the longest waits. Since HBO’s Game of Thrones, streamers have invested closely in cinematic occasion reveals that may break via the muddle amid a mean of 600 scripted reveals a yr. Such reveals are likely to require an extended manufacturing schedule (but Thrones, many overlook, managed to repeatedly churn out a brand new season yearly till its seventh-and-final season, which took two years).
Such gaps include some danger — 54 p.c of the examine’s respondents mentioned they might be more likely to cancel a service subscription as a result of lengthy waits for participating content material.
“Many original shows build highly dedicated audiences that remain loyal despite increasingly long waits between seasons,” mentioned Christen Tamisin, Senior Analyst at Ampere Evaluation. “However, streamers need to balance blockbuster production timelines against a steady flow of content. Extended gaps may generate anticipation around flagship titles, but they can also encourage audiences to cancel subscriptions and return only when major shows are back on screen.”
That danger is probably going increased when courting youthful viewers. Lately, another study by Dentsu and IGN Leisure confirmed that greater than half of Gen Z customers mentioned they are going to cancel and renew streaming providers to “chase a single title” slightly than simply purchase and maintain a subscription service. The examine claimed “platform loyalty is effectively dead.”
