Study: Amazon, Hulu and Netflix probably have too much overlap to subscribe to all three

Given how much of a major shift we’ve seen in where the average person gets their TV and movie fix from these days — the slow, steady transition from overpriced cable to convenient, affordable streaming options — it’s only natural that the full scope of those offerings will get closer scrutiny as time goes on.

For example, it can be a bit of a chore sometimes to research which of your favorite programs is streaming where. And to keep up with the license agreements that expire, meaning your show disappears from one service and reappears elsewhere. They all also fight for exclusives, not to mention produce their own original buzzworthy series and movies.

With that in mind, the streaming aggregator Reelgood has come out with the results of a study looking at the content overlap between the “big three” — Amazon, Hulu and Netflix. Results that will presumably help you make an informed decision in terms of which one or ones you’d want to subscribe to, depending on if movies are mostly what you want or if TV show binges are more your thing and if you want to minimize paying for the same content multiple times.

Among the takeaways here; let’s start with TV. As this Venn Diagram shows, you probably don’t want to subscribe to both Amazon and Hulu if you’re worried about having too much show overlap:

As you can see, those services share 245 shows between them. Netflix and Hulu, likewise, overlap a bit on TV, sharing 149 shows, while 109 shows span both Netflix and Amazon’s offering. While only 47 shows cross all three services and that’s not admittedly much overlap between all three, again, in order to buy all three services you’ll have to live with a good bit of overlap between at least two of them, as that diagram shows.

The overlap is even more pronounced when it comes to looking at movies across the three services. Take a look at this diagram, and you’ll see why:

Not only does Amazon have a pretty fat library when it comes to movies, but it shares some 530 titles with Hulu. That 530, it should be noted, is also more than a third of Hulu’s total movie inventory, according to Reelgood.

Netflix, as you can see above, shares 277 movies with Amazon, which represents less than 10 percent of Netflix’s movie inventory, again according to Reelgood. Hulu also shares 52 movie titles with Netflix, and only seven titles at the time of Reelgood’s analysis spanned all three services.