The Unified Streaming Power Index: April 2026

The first Unified Streaming Power Index was built in public and invited the industry to challenge the math. April's index is better — more streamers, sharper sourcing, and one correction significant enough to move a platform from ninth place to second.

See who moved up and who moved down in April's USPI - get it here.

What We Got Right

Prime Video at number one holds. The commerce loop connecting ad exposure to purchase behavior remains structurally unreplicable.

Peacock as the validation case holds. It remains the only platform where ad spend rank and composite rank agree: $1.91 billion in spend, 46 million paid subscribers disclosed in Q1 2026 earnings, and the strongest attention-conversion data point in the index — 20% of vertical clip viewers during the Winter Olympics navigated directly into the full live stream.

The Hulu structural argument holds. Seven to nine ad minutes per hour against an audience that rates ad relevance as poor. The largest spend number in streaming attached to one of the worst ad experience scores in the composite.

What We Missed

Q1 isolated The Roku Channel and penalized it for thin content heat. That was the wrong unit of analysis.

The correct unit is the Roku operating system. 100 million streaming households. Advertising revenue of $613 million growing 27% year over year. An advertising gross margin of 60.5% that exceeds the total margin of most on this list. The Roku Q1 2026 shareholder letter confirmed that more than half of Peacock sign-ups in February originated from the Roku Experience — not from Peacock's app, not from a Peacock ad. From Roku's home screen.

As we reported, Roku does not need sports rights. It needs sports subscribers. Roku moves to number two. The methodology error was real. The correction is bigger.

The Denominator Got Bigger

Q1 anchored to 101,582,619 U.S. broadband households. April adds a second denominator: 117,696,246 households with any cellular data plan. The 16.7 million cellular-only households — disproportionately lower-income, disproportionately valuable to consumer packaged goods, quick-service restaurant, and wireless advertisers — reach the internet through a phone and nothing else.

As we reported, three platforms made credible moves toward that universe this month: Disney+ via Verts, Roku via Howdy, Peacock via its vertical conversion data, and Netflix via its mobile redesign and video podcast exclusives. The remaining 16 platforms are still pricing off the smaller household number.