How we score streaming services

The two types of service are not measurable on the same axis, so they are measured differently.

Live TV is scored on how many of the 20 most-watched US cable networks it carries, checked against the channel lineup we keep for every service: Fox News, MS NOW, HGTV, ESPN, CNN, Hallmark Channel, TBS, USA Network, History, TLC, Food Network, Discovery, Game Show Network, TNT, INSP, TV Land, Investigation Discovery, A&E, AMC and Bravo. Carry all 20 and you score 10, but the scale bends: the first channels a service adds count for more than the last few, so ten of the 20 already scores 7.1 and five scores 5. That includes free services with a live guide: hundreds of channels count for nothing here if none of them are the ones people actually watch.

On-demand is scored on how many titles from the AGMTW recommended list it carries. That is our own curation, built over a decade, so it measures the thing readers actually come here for: is there anything on it worth watching. The count is log-scaled, so going from 50 to 100 good films counts for more than going from 900 to 950.

Source: the channel lineup we keep for every service; ustvdb.com network ratings for the 20 networks; the AGMTW catalog.

Price against the cheapest service of the same kind, then weighed against what the service actually carries.

A $90 cable replacement and a $9 channel package are not offering the same thing, so ranking them together says nothing. Every service sits in a basket defined by its type and its price band, and its price is scored against the floor of that basket, on a curve: twice the cheapest price scores 7.1, not 5, since paying more for a better service isn't a crime. But cheap is only good value if there is something to watch, so that price score is then scaled by the content score: a service with full content keeps all of it, one with nothing worth watching keeps half. Being free, on its own, no longer earns a perfect score.

Source: the advertised monthly price of the plan we list; the content score above.

Half how good the app is, half how many screens it actually runs on.

A service can have a beautiful app nobody can install, or run everywhere and be miserable to use. Scoring both catches both. The device list is Roku, Fire TV, Apple TV, Chromecast, Samsung, LG, Vizio, Xbox, PlayStation, iPhone, Android and the web browser.

Source: live iOS App Store and Google Play ratings; the platform's own supported-devices page.

The picture and sound you actually get, on the plan whose price we list.

Usually the base plan. Plenty of services advertise 4K that only exists on a tier costing twice as much, and we score the tier a reader would actually land on.

Source: the platform's published specifications.

How far you can build the package you want, instead of paying for one fixed lineup.

We count the genre add-on packs a live TV package sells at $15 a month or less: sports, news, kids, Spanish-language, lifestyle and so on. Single premium networks sold on their own don't count, since nearly every service resells the same ones. The scale bends like the content scale: the first few packs count for more than the last. On-demand, free and single-network services have no package to build on, so they skip this criterion and keep the four-criteria weights.

Source: the platform's own add-on and package pages.