Hub Entertainment Research’s 2026 Decoding the Default study gives you a useful retention target beyond subscriber count: become the service viewers open first.
The study surveyed 1,600 U.S. TV viewers ages 16 to 74 with broadband access in August 2026, with the sample balanced to U.S. census demographics. Among Netflix users, 28% say they’d keep it if they could retain only one provider. Among viewers who call Netflix their default, that jumps to 62%. Disney+ goes from 10% among all users to 61% among default users. Hub also found that 69% of viewers have kept their current default source for more than two years.
There’s no single feature that gets you there. You need enough reasons for people to open your app regularly, enough visibility to show up before they choose something else, and a product that gets them to something worth watching without making them work for it. Then you need to remember what they care about so the next visit gets easier.
Default starts with one clear reason to open your app
A huge catalog doesn’t automatically make you someone’s first stop. People need to know what they’re coming to you for.
That answer will look different depending on the service. You might want to become the first stop for live sports. Maybe it’s kids viewing, anime, prestige drama, comfort viewing, news, local programming or free lean-back TV. Hub’s earlier research found that viewers who defaulted to live TV placed more value on live and local programming, while FAST defaults over-indexed on variety and ease of use.
That gives your product and programming teams a much better question than “how do we increase engagement?”
What should make someone open your service first?
If sports is core to the product, it should be dead simple to see what’s live, follow a team and jump straight into a game. If you run a FAST service, you need to be great at the moment someone wants to watch something without spending five minutes choosing. A general entertainment service might focus on the nightly browse. A kids service might win by making repeat viewing safe and painless for parents.
Once you know what that job is, the product should reflect it. Sports needs schedules, alerts, team preferences and direct links into live games. Lean-back TV needs fast starts and good channels. Premium SVOD needs recommendations that can turn a smaller number of expensive shows into regular viewing.
Trying to serve every kind of viewing equally usually leaves the app fighting with itself.
More viewing occasions mean fewer dead weeks between tentpoles
If viewers only think about your service when a blockbuster drops, you’re going to have a hard time becoming habitual.
A big series can own six weeks of attention and then disappear from the household routine. Live programming, sports, news, daily shows, weekly franchises, creator content, FAST channels and complementary services can fill some of those gaps.
Hub’s Jon Giegengack pointed to combinations such as Fox and Roku, Peacock and YouTube Premium, and Netflix with TF1 in France as examples of businesses giving viewers more reasons to start in the same place.
You can pressure-test your slate pretty simply:
| Viewer need | Programming response |
|---|---|
| What gets someone in tonight? | Tentpoles, premieres, live events |
| What gets them back tomorrow? | Daily programming, news, sports, creator content |
| What creates a weekly habit? | Episodic releases, leagues, recurring franchises |
| What works when they don’t know what they want? | Recommendations, FAST channels, familiar library titles |
| What keeps the service useful between big releases? | More frequent programming, partnerships, aggregation |
If nearly every reason to open your service depends on the next expensive original, you’re going to have a lot of quiet days between hits.
A second reliable reason to come back can sometimes do more for retention than another tentpole aimed at the same audience.
CTV discovery can steal the session before your app opens
The fight for the session often starts before anyone opens your app.
Roku, Fire TV, Google TV, Samsung and other CTV environments now put shows, movies, sports and subscriptions directly on the TV home screen. Hero banners, recommendation rows, app placement, universal search and deep links all shape what gets opened next. That has made the CTV home screen an external shelf for streaming services.
A 2026 Looper Insights survey of 63 senior industry executives found that 48% considered the hero or featured banner the most commercially valuable CTV placement, with another 27% choosing the top-row app position.
Simply having an app on Roku or Fire TV doesn’t tell you whether anyone will see it.
You should be negotiating and measuring hero placements, title-level recommendations, app position, universal search, deep links, Watch Next integrations, sports destinations and launch support. If you’re spending heavily on a major premiere, you need a plan for the TV home screen along with the plan for your own app.
A useful question for every major launch is simple:
When someone turns on the TV, how many ways can they land in your programming before they decide which app to open?
Looper tracks how apps and titles appear across CTV interfaces, including paid placements, editorial placements, position and prominence. That can help you separate three very different problems: your programming didn’t get enough exposure, people saw it and passed, or they opened your app and still didn’t watch.
The CTV Data Taster lets you look at that pre-app experience using your own service, a competitor, a title or an event. The complimentary 45-minute session looks at visibility, competitive prominence and paid, editorial and algorithmic exposure rather than what happens once viewers are inside your app.
Get people to something worth watching fast
Winning the app open doesn’t help much if viewers spend the next five minutes hunting around.
Someone showing up for a live game should see the game. Someone halfway through a series should be able to resume it immediately. Someone browsing without a title in mind needs a short list of decent options. Someone searching for a specific movie needs a clean answer about whether it’s available and a direct path to play.
Those are different problems, so measure them separately.
Track how long it takes to get from app open to playback, how often people browse and leave without watching, how often searches lead to playback, how often recommendations lead to playback and how many sessions begin through Continue Watching or another direct return path.
A three-click trip to the right show is better than a one-click autoplay into something irrelevant.
Your app should roughly follow this order:
- Put unfinished viewing and saved titles where people can find them.
- Make search, live programming and known titles easy to reach.
- Use personalization to narrow the choices for people who are browsing.
- Use editorial placement when a premiere, live event or business priority deserves the space.
Every extra row competes with those jobs. If it doesn’t help somebody watch, it’s taking space from something that might.
Profiles, watchlists and follows should make the next visit easier
Hub found that 68% of viewers agree they’ve made their default source “their own” through profiles, watchlists or saved preferences. Among viewers ages 16 to 34, that rises to 79%, compared with 62% for viewers 35 and older.
Those features all do something practical.
A profile stops one person’s viewing from muddying someone else’s recommendations. Continue Watching remembers where they left off. A watchlist remembers what they wanted to try later. Ratings, favorites and viewing history give recommendations more to work with. Language and accessibility settings save people from fixing the same thing again.
You want to collect that information without turning signup into a survey.
The first session can start building viewing history. The second might be a good time to ask someone to save a show. If they watch a game, ask whether they want to follow the team. If a parent keeps opening kids programming, give them an obvious reason to create a kids profile.
The useful question is:
What does your service know now that can make the next visit better?
Look at how many active viewers have their own profile, a saved title, something in Continue Watching, a followed team or franchise, or another clear preference. Then compare those groups with viewers who haven’t done any of that.
The point of a watchlist isn’t getting someone to click “add.” It’s getting them back to something they already wanted to watch.
Judge recommendations by what people actually watch
Your app can offer hundreds of choices and still be terrible at helping somebody pick something.
Your recommendation team should look past the click.
A flashy tile can generate plenty of selections followed by quick exits. A familiar show may get fewer exploratory clicks but lead to an hour of viewing and another visit the next night.
The useful sequence is:
impression → selection → playback → meaningful viewing → return
If your recommendations generate clicks but people bail a few minutes later, you’re doing a good job selling titles and a bad job helping people choose.
Search gives you an even cleaner signal. Someone who types something into your search box has already told you what they want. Zero results, bad spelling handling, confusing availability or poor title matching wastes that intent.
Those failures deserve more attention than another round of UI tweaks.
Saved intent gives people an easier way back
People shouldn’t have to rebuild yesterday’s viewing plan every time they open your app.
Continue Watching already handles that for unfinished titles. The same idea works for new episodes, saved movies, upcoming games, followed teams, recurring live shows, expiring programming and franchise releases.
The sequence is straightforward:
the viewer shows interest → you remember it → you bring it back when it’s useful
That can happen inside the app, through a push notification, by email, on mobile or on the CTV home screen.
Sports makes this obvious. If someone follows the Knicks, they shouldn’t need to search for the Knicks every time there’s a game. You already know what they care about and when that game starts.
The same goes for unfinished series, followed franchises, upcoming premieres and saved titles.
You should know how much returning viewing comes from remembered interest versus another fresh browse from scratch. More direct returns mean fewer sessions where the viewer has to start over.
Churn shows up late. The warning signs show up earlier
You can hold churn steady while slowly becoming less important to the household.
People may still be paying while opening YouTube more often, spending more nights in a FAST service or letting the TV OS decide what to watch. By the time that behavior turns into a cancellation, you may have been losing viewing days for months.
There isn’t one perfect “default” metric, so watch a handful of signals that tell you whether the habit is getting stronger or weaker.
| Signal | What to look for |
|---|---|
| Claimed default share | How many viewers say this is where they start |
| Share of viewing days | How often the service shows up during the week |
| Sessions per active viewer | How often people come back |
| Time to playback | How quickly an app open becomes viewing |
| Direct return rate | How often saved or unfinished viewing brings someone back |
| Search-to-play conversion | How often a search ends in playback |
| Recommendation-to-play conversion | How often a recommendation ends in playback |
| Profiles, saves and follows | How many viewers have given the service something useful to remember |
| CTV visibility | How often the service or its titles appear before the app opens |
| Retention by behavior | Which viewer behaviors show up most often among people who stay |
Then start crossing the data.
Do viewers who use your service three days a week cancel less often than viewers who show up once? Do people with watchlists or followed teams return more often? Does better CTV placement generate more starts? Do fewer failed searches lead to more viewing? Does adding a regular live or weekly program keep tentpole subscribers around longer?
Those are questions you can test before somebody hits cancel.
Spend against the part of the experience that’s actually broken
“Become the default” shouldn’t become a giant initiative with every team claiming a piece of it.
Find the problem.
If you have great programming and weak CTV visibility, you have a distribution problem. Better recommendations won’t help if viewers rarely encounter your app or titles in the first place.
If you’re getting plenty of app opens but lots of browsing with no playback, you have a discovery problem.
If you pop during big releases and disappear afterward, you need more reasons for people to come back between premieres.
If you’re getting regular viewing but very little profile, watchlist or follow activity, you need to do a better job remembering what viewers care about.
If you know those preferences but still make viewers search all over again every visit, you have a return-path problem.
And if all of that looks healthy while customers keep leaving, the problem may be price or perceived value.
That should drive your roadmap. A redesign should increase viewing starts. An OS integration should send more sessions into your app. Profiles, follows and watchlists should improve return viewing or recommendations. A live-programming investment should give people another day of the week to open your service.
Shipping something isn’t the win. Changing what viewers do is.
The Streaming Wars Take
Your next retention dollar should go toward the part of the experience that’s costing you repeat viewing.
If people open your app and watch but rarely encounter you on the TV home screen, spend on distribution. If they open your app and wander around without watching, fix discovery. If they watch a tentpole and disappear for two months, give them another reason to come back. If they keep returning but your app still treats every visit like the first one, fix profiles, saves, follows and recommendations.
That gives you a cleaner way to judge product work too. A redesign should get more people into something they watch. An OS deal should drive incremental sessions. A team-follow feature should bring sports fans back for the next game. A watchlist should turn saved intent into viewing.
You’re already spending heavily to acquire households and then spending again trying to save them when they cancel. Hub’s research puts a number on the value of what happens in between: getting people to start with your service often enough that it becomes the obvious place to go first.
Disclosure: Looper Insights is an Insiders Circle partner of The Streaming Wars. Looper had no editorial control over this article.
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