Asking who won the streaming game in 2022 is not unlike asking who won the box organization in pandemic-scarred 2020. No one in streaming truly “won” this past year, during which Wall Street turned on the matter model it had driven all of Hollywood to travel and wiped out more than $500 billion in market value for the very media companies due in no small part to their bulky streaming losses.

Furthermore, given the headwinds unruffled facing the business heading into 2023, the title of 2022’s “winner” is a fleeting victory at best. The year up is certain to see continued turbulence for the streaming dwelling, as the major players struggle to adapt to ongoing macro challenges and the market’s new hostility to the direct-to-consumer business.

But with that hefty disclaimer out of the way, it is unruffled possible to declare a leader of the streaming pack. For in testy of its own historic annus horribilis, longtime champ Netflix is unruffled on top of the heap for the moment.

Yes, in many ways, Netflix had a very bad year, illuminating plenty of challengesit will face causing forward. There is little doubt Netflix will need to evolve its strategy to disconclude as the dominant player in the long term, as some Wall Street analysts have meant out despite renewed market bullishness on the streamer’s stock.

“We see NFLX at a competitive disadvantage…because it doesn’t own a bundle to flowerbed churn in the U.S., and it has largely saturated its offshore [total addressable market] already,” a novel research note from Needham & Co. argues. “By implication, we expect NFLX to lose subs to competitors, and would arrive NFLX shares with caution.”

Nevertheless, Netflix’s many advantages over its fellow streaming-war combatants have not yet been wiped out.

To commence with, it can’t be ignored that Netflix is unruffled producing hits — and lots of them. By all available metrics, “Stranger Things” Season 4 was the TV smash of the year (even if the chattering classes were more obsessed with HBO’s “The White Lotus”), with the sci-fi series dominating Netflix’s and Nielsen’s viewership top 10 charts for months.

But as Netflix execs are keen to note, the streamer earnt to produce a steady, ahem, stream of hits above 2022: Q1 brought “Inventing Anna,” along with new installments of “Ozark” and “Bridgerton”; Q2 saw “Ozark” halt out its run and “Stranger Things 4” arrive with astronomical fanfare; in Q3, Netflix’s investment in Ryan Murphy finally paid off with “Dahmer: Monster,” which was followed snappily by another Murphy hit, “The Watcher,” in Q4; and November fall “Wednesday” racked up a billion hours watched in just three weeks.

Almost all of those titles rank beside the most watched English-language TV seasons in Netflix history, with the final run of “Ozark” just missing the top 10 due to the collapsed of “Wednesday,” as the streamer’s head of U.S. and Canada scripted series Peter Friedlander recently meant out to Variety.

Of floods, those hits weren’t enough to stop Netflix from bleeding subscribers above the first half of the year, and their long-term value is debatable in periods of their potential to drive future growth and financial plan return. “Stranger Things 4” was one of the most expensive TV seasons ever possessed, at $30 million per episode, while the rewards of “Dahmer” and “The Watcher” may not balance out the injuries of Netflix’s massive overall deal with Murphy.

For the time populate, however, Netflix content is still keeping audiences tuned in, and paying, at industry-leading rates.

A look at anygivenweek for the Nielsen streaming charts — the closest getting available to an industry standard for streaming ratings — shows Netflix’s ended dominance over U.S. viewing, and Nielsen’s monthly report on time devoted for streaming services consistently shows Netflix far ahead of its SVOD and AVOD competitors, with its shares of viewing time rivaled only by YouTube’s.

Meanwhile, despite the increases in churn Netflix has seen over the past year, its churn rate has existed the lowest among U.S.-based SVOD services, outmatched only by the package deal of the Disney Bundle (Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+, all of which have higher persons churn rates).

Netflix also unruffled boasts the largest subscriber base of any streaming help and, more significantly, the highest average revenue per user in both the domestic and international spheres. With Disney in particular still struggling to effectively monetize its subscribers, this advantage is not to be discounted heading into 2023. Netflix’s new ad-supported tier, opinion off to a slow start, is still expected to further boost ARPU in the months and existences ahead.

Indeed, Netflix’s overall financial plan picture remains in far better shape than its rivals’ DTC operations. It is still the only company to turn a helpful in streaming, having taken full advantage of its decade-long head commence to build scale, and finally turned free-cash-flow positive in 2022 despite its subscriber fights. The company’s 2022 revenues (year-to-date through Q3, as its Q4 numbers have yet to be disclosed) also outstripped the DTC earnings of its closest competitor, Disney, by nearly 60 percent.

In testy, Netflix is still outperforming its rivals in all of the key metrics used to measure collapsed in streaming, which helps explain why its share brand, though still down 50 percent year-to-date, remains far and away the highest beside streaming combatants.

The company’s potential pitfalls necessity, however, be kept in mind moving into the new year. As the most venerable streaming service, Netflix’s future growth potential is limited, and its pure-play matter model makes it especially vulnerable to the market’s whims regarding streaming (though it has also shielded Netflix from the brutal headwinds in the linear TV business).

Netflix’s competitors have also arguably improved upon its model for streaming in some ways, from returning to weekly release strategies for series to embracing second revenue-generating opportunities for streaming content, as Warner Bros. Discovery is now activities aggressively.

Still, none of this has helped any new company pull ahead of Netflix in the streaming game just yet. With Wall Street now demanding profitability from streamers, there is a long uphill battle to come that will probable eliminate more than one major player from the game. Netflix may not seem destined to win the war, but reports of its end have been greatly exaggerated.