Mind the Subscription gap
Bango dropped their Subscription Signals 2026 report in Lisbon this week. We went through all of it.
“Over 40% of American & British Millennials and GenZ would double their ad load for lower price points."
Giles Tongue
This week on The Media Odyssey Podcast, Evan Shapiro and I dig into a brand new report which Bango dropped at Stream TV Europe in Lisbon on Monday. We had a preview before the conference and let’s just say we geeked out on the data so grab the report there and watch this one on YouTube or Spotify.
Bango, for context, powers the backend of many of the bundles you already use without thinking about it. Two services or more, one price point, invisible infrastructure, that is the business. Giles Tongue runs marketing there and co-authored the study which covers subscription attitudes and behaviour across the US and UK.
The numbers open simply enough: 5.2 subscriptions per person in the US, 5.7 in the UK, with British households spending roughly 25% more per month than American ones despite historically cheaper pricing tiers.
What gets interesting is the category that ranked second overall by share of subscribers, beating music by nearly double and what that gap reveals about consumer behaviour that most platform strategies have yet to absorb.
Loyalty is the other thread running through the whole study. When 60% of consumers in both markets say they follow a show more than a service, the serial churner stops being an edge case and starts looking like the base case for almost every platform not named Netflix or Amazon. Evan and I have a clear view on what the only structural response to that actually looks like.
The conversation also gets into who consumers actually expect their bundles to come from (the answer is not who you think), whether agentic AI managing your subscriptions is convenience or a step too far.
Tongue’s read on where telcos specifically sit in the bundling equation was the sharpest moment in the conversation for me, because the risk he describes is not about missing an opportunity so much as waking up one day on the wrong side of someone else’s deal. Bundle or be bundled.
Download the full Subscription Signals 2026 report then LISTEN and/or WATCH in full 👉🏻 APPLE PODCASTS | SPOTIFY | YOUTUBE | DEEZER with more platforms here.
Before you go, this Sunday, tickets to attend Streaming Made Easy Live Amsterdam (on September 10th) are going live. Get on the waitlist to make sure you can benefit from our early bird pricing.
That’s it for today but before you go: