The streaming wars have shifted from a struggle for subscriber growth to a high stakes battle for active attention – and the frontline is now the fight against the ‘YouTube scroll’.
With TV sets overtaking mobile and online viewing as the most popular way to watch YouTube, the most critical KPI for SVOD leaders is no longer just churn (more from us on that HERE) but also switching power.
This is the measurable ability of a platform’s library to pull a user out of a free YouTube session on TV and into a paid service.
New data from Digital i has explored exactly which content is powerful enough to trigger this transition. The short answer is crime drama; the longer answer demonstrates the strategic value of premium storytelling.
In research that we first presented at the Media Insights and Engagement Conference in Miami earlier this year, Digital i identified SVOD viewing sessions during H1 2025 that immediately follow a YouTube viewing session via the TV set.
These SVOD sessions were measured across Netflix, HBO Max, Disney Plus and Prime Video in the U.S., Canada, Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, the UK, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, The Netherlands, Poland, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Australia, South Korea and Japan.
As you can see in the chart above, we then compared the genres that users chose (the orange bars, "% Switch Streams") against their baseline viewing habits (the black bars, "% All Streams").
The benchmark for crime drama is 9%. This is a healthy, but not dominant, figure for the genre. However, the percentage of post-YouTube switches jumps to 11%.
While at first glance, 2% may appear to be a numerically small figure, when you are looking at billions of viewing hours across millions of accounts, that increase represents a massive shift.
That jump means that after watching YouTube on TV, viewers are over 22% more likely to choose a crime drama than they are at any other time.
When you apply a 2% lift to those four streamers’ TV set-viewing audience across so many regions, you are talking about millions of active switches and incredible retention value. It is the difference between a user turning off the TV and a user starting a new, 60-minute premium experience.
This lift isn’t limited to just one genre, as we see the same pattern, though to a smaller degree, in mystery drama, history drama, and crime documentary. These premium, narrative-driven genres all pull viewers over to SVOD in a way that others do not.
For example, crime documentaries are 50% more likely to be the chosen ‘next watch’ compared to their total market share (3% vs 2%).
However, if the success of crime drama is the "pull," then the data for animation comedy demonstrates the "push." While it represents a massive 12% of all streams, its post-YouTube switch rate drops to 10%.
This suggests that while audiences watch a lot of this genre, they don't necessarily leave YouTube TV sessions specifically to find it. They likely stumble into it during a general SVOD session.
Our takeaway: This research indicates that the real drivers of platform switching on TV sets are premium drama and high-end documentaries.
These play to the strengths of SVODs by creating a necessary destination to view the type of content that YouTube does not widely serve.
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