Which Streaming Service Gives You the Most for Your Money? Spoiler: It's Not Netflix

If you’re only going to subscribe to one streaming service, which one should it be? The answer isn't Netflix, Lifehacker reports. Per an analysis by Reelgood, a streaming service aggregator, the answer is either Hulu Plus or Prime Video, depending on whether you care more about movies or television.

Reelgood compared price and selection across the five major streaming services to figure out where you can get the most for your money. Between Netflix, Hulu, Prime Video, HBO, and Showtime, Prime Video has the biggest movie library, with 10,731 movies available to stream, and is also one of the least expensive. It’s currently $8.99 if you exclusively subscribe to Prime Video rather than the full suite of Prime benefits (though Reelgood used the old annual Prime price of $99, Amazon upped the price to $119 in 2018, making it about $9.92 a month for annual subscribers). So if you’re a monthly video subscriber, that’s essentially 1200 movies available for every $1 you spend a month. Netflix, by contrast, only has 3857 films in its catalog right now.

What about television? Hulu Plus costs $7.99 a month (the same as Netflix’s most basic plan) and offers 1784 streaming television shows. Meanwhile, Prime offers 1515 shows, and Netflix offers 1301. HBO only offers 62 shows for its $14.99 a month—though you’re not going to get your Game of Thrones fix anywhere else, sorry—and Showtime only offers 62.

But quantity isn’t everything. To take into account whether all those movies and shows are actually things you might want to watch, Reelgood also crunched some data using IMDb scores and its own list of the most popular titles on the Reelgood site, finding that Prime Video has the most “quality” movies—meaning it had at least a 6.0 score on IMDb and was in the top 20,000 most-popular titles on Reelgood—and Hulu has the most quality shows. So you’re getting both quantity and quality for your money.

When the criteria were narrowed even further to titles with an IMDb score of 7.5 or higher, however, Netflix ended up doing a bit better. It tied with Prime Video for the most high-quality movies, 105 each. Hulu had 167 “high-quality” shows, while Netflix had 158, and Prime had 96.

With all this in mind, it might be time to rethink your streaming subscriptions.

[h/t Lifehacker]