“Fifty-seven channels and nothing.”
Bruce Springsteen said those famous words during a concert and later in a song in the 1990s about the number of television channels that were seemingly growing disproportionately to the availability of enjoyable content.
Within a few years, there would be hundreds of television channels and yet, some would argue with hyperbolic frustration, “nothing to watch.”
The arrival of streaming services was emerging as a possible solution to this problem. It gave viewers easy, on-demand access to thousands of movies and shows, which could, in theory, ensure that viewers could always find something to watch.
However, according to a Nielsen Gracenote survey, that’s not exactly the case today.
Gracenote, a Nielsen-owned content data company, surveyed 3,000 streaming video users in the U.S., Brazil, France, Germany, Mexico, and the U.K. who were at least 18 years old for its “State of Play in 2026: Amid Frustrations of Fragmentation, UX is the Future of Streaming” report. He found that many struggle to find something to broadcast. However, this is not necessarily because there is nothing good out there, but rather because they have a hard time finding good content on streaming services.
For example, more than 51 percent of respondents said that “the abundance of content and [streaming] Amenities make it harder to find something to watch.”
Additionally, 19.2 percent of respondents said that, on average, they “always” or “often” don’t know what to look at, can’t find anything, and then decide to do something else. And 27.4 percent of respondents said that, on average, they always or often try to watch a specific show but end up not watching it because they can’t find it streaming.
“Through the lens of catalog 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. However, audiences aren’t finding what they’re looking for, and content discovery challenges are increasing,” the report reads.
