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Amazon Prime Video Has the Most Shows, but Netflix Slays the Competition With Quality

When it comes to streaming originals, Netflix has most of the highest-rated TV show content, well ahead of the competition. But for licensed TV shows worth watching, go with Hulu.

Eric Griffith
 & Eric Griffith Senior Editor, Features

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Our pals at Reelgood.com have helped us before with a look at content found on the major streaming services and helped to determine which service has not only the most content but also the highest quality. Reelgood has updated the data again, concentrating on the TV shows you can find to watch—and how many of them are really worth watching.

This data is up-to-date as of June 18, 2020, and involves three different looks. At top, you can see what is arguably the most important set of metrics. It shows the number of licensed shows versus original shows on each service, but only those that are considered high-quality. In this case, that means shows with an 8.0 or higher average rating by users of IMDb (also, each show has to have at least 300 or more votes to be included, which provides some good statistical validity to the numbers).

Clearly, Netflix is the winner here. It's got 184 licensed shows (programs it didn't create but gets to run at least for a while) and 151 original shows (programs it paid for and gets to run forever and never has to share), all with high ratings. Think about that for a second—can you even name 151 shows with ratings that good, let alone that can be found all on one service and produced by that service? That's a stunning achievement.

If you believe in the power of  original programming, then the next best is HBO Max, home of all the HBO original shows, even going back to the days before The Sopranos. Having 75 high-quality originals is also an achievement. (HBO Max, the new iteration of the service for streaming, also licenses other shows now, so it's got 38 of them.) 

Hulu's high numbers  come mainly from licensing, which is what it does best—it's great for next-day viewing of shows that originated on many other networks. Amazon's Prime Video has a lot of shows as well, and 40 high-quality originals, well ahead of Hulu's 16. Bringing up the rear, for now, are Disney+ and Apple TV+. The latter streams only original shows, so it's three best reviewed shows make up that entire bar.

Want to take the quality down a notch? Okay, here's a bar chart of shows with an IMDb rating of 6.5 or higher.

Licensed and Original Quality TV Shows Available on US Streaming Services

All the numbers go up, and you can see Hulu's licensed-content strategy—working with lots of networks, since it used to be owned by lots of networks before Disney took it over. But that said, so does Netflix's strategy of spending literally billions of dollars on original shows that people still like.

Related

If you don't care about quality, here's the chart you really want: a look at the total number of TV shows, original versus licensed, on all those services. Excellence be damned.

Licensed and Original TV Shows Available on US Streaming Services

This is clearly Prime Video's place to shine; it's got more content than anyone. That's a total of 2,236 TV shows you can watch for "free" (if you subscribe to Amazon Prime), 134 of them Amazon's army of originals. For in-house programs, Amazon's in third, behind Netflix and HBO. If you get only one streaming-service subscription, Amazon's will keep you the busiest.

Netflix doesn't have as many shows total as Prime Video, but it does have that  astronomical number of originals, 674 in total. In just a few years, Netflix has created more multi-episode television than most networks have in the last few decades. It throws in 1,275 licensed shows on top. Consider how many of them have earned high ratings when you make a choice.

Further Reading

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About Our Expert

Eric Griffith

Eric Griffith

Senior Editor, Features

My Experience

I've been writing about computers, the internet, and technology professionally since 1992, more than half of that time with PCMag. I arrived at the end of the print era of PC Magazine as a senior writer. I served for a time as managing editor of business coverage before settling back into the features team for the last decade and a half. I write features on all tech topics, plus I handle several special projects, including the Readers' Choice and Business Choice surveys and yearly coverage of the Best ISPs and Best Gaming ISPs, Best Products of the Year, and Best Brands (plus the Best Brands for Tech Support, Longevity, and Reliability).

I started in tech publishing right out of college, writing and editing stories about hardware and development tools. I migrated to software and hardware coverage for families, and I spent several years exclusively writing about the then-burgeoning technology called Wi-Fi. I was on the founding staff of several magazines, including Windows Sources, FamilyPC, and Access Internet Magazine. All of which are now defunct, and it's not my fault. I have freelanced for publications as diverse as Sony Style, Playboy.com, and Flux. I got my degree at Ithaca College in, of all things, television/radio. But I minored in writing so I'd have a future.

In my long-lost free time, I wrote some novels, a couple of which are not just on my hard drive: BETA TEST ("an unusually lighthearted apocalyptic tale," according to Publishers' Weekly) and a YA book called KALI: THE GHOSTING OF SEPULCHER BAY. Go get them on Kindle.

I work from my home in Ithaca, NY, and did it long before pandemics made it cool.

The Technology I Use

My first computer was a Laser 128, an Apple II-compatible clone with an integrated keyboard, matched with an eye-straining monochrome green monitor. I used it to type papers in college for other people for money...until I discovered the Mac SE in the college computer room. That changed my life. My first cellphone was a Samsung Uproar—the silver one with the built-in MP3 player from the Napster days (the pre-iPod era).

I use an iPhone 15 Pro hourly and an iPad Air infrequently (but I'm always in the market for a cheap Android tablet). I have a PlayStation 5 just to play Spider-Man, and several Windows machines, including a work-issued Lenovo ThinkPad. I talk to Alexa and Siri all day long. I do the majority of my computing on a 15-inch LG Gram laptop attached to a Thunderbolt hub to run a multi-monitor setup—I overdid it on the power needed to simply work from home.

I'm most at home in Microsoft Word after decades of writing there. More and more, I turn to services like Google Docs, using tools like Grammarly. I use Google's Chrome browser due to an addiction to several extensions I think I can't live without, but probably could. I use Excel extensively on data-intensive stories, but for chart creation, we've switched over entirely to using Infogram for interactive features that are hard to find elsewhere. I do a lot of graphics work for my stories, but limit myself to the free and amazing Paint.NET software to edit images.

I'm a firm evangelist for using the cloud for backup and syncing of files; I'm primarily using Dropbox, which has never failed me, but I also have redundant setups on Microsoft OneDrive, plus extra picture backups on Amazon Photos and iCloud. Why take chances? For entertainment, mine is a streaming-only household—my kid has never seen network TV and barely been exposed to commercials, thanks to Roku and Amazon Music. The house is peppered with smart speakers from Amazon for instant gratification and control of smart home devices like multiple Wyze cameras and Nest Protect smoke detectors. I've got accounts on all the major social networks, to my horror. I have a robot vacuum for each floor of the house. I want a 3D printer, but not sure what I'd use it for.

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