The 2025 Vergecast streaming draft

(Before we get started, a reminder: The Vergecast is nominated for a Webby Award! Voting is only open for a few more days, and the award is decided by your votes. We’re up against some steep competition, but we really want to win — and we’d love your help. Thanks so much to everyone who already voted, too! Okay, on to the episode.)

The streaming business is a strange, strange place. For some companies, it’s more stable than ever: Netflix, Disney, and a couple of others have turned internet TV and movies into a legitimate and thriving business. For others, well, it’s complicated. Would you bet on Max, Paramount Plus, and Peacock all still being around a year from now? And that’s not to mention the side-hustle streaming services, like Apple TV Plus and Amazon Prime Video, and the social platforms like TikTok and YouTube that often feel simultaneously precarious and unstoppable. It’s not easy, fighting the streaming wars.

That’s why, once a year, we dive in and try to figure out where things are headed. On this episode of The Vergecast, it’s time for our third annual Streaming Draft. The rules are simple: there are seven categories, three hosts, and thus a total of 21 services to be drafted. Each service can only be drafted once, and whoever picks the best roster wins.

The Verge’s Jake Kastrenakes took over for Alex’s picks this year, and alongside David and Nilay he kicked off the draft. Each of the three hosts then had to fill the following seven categories:

This may not surprise you, but the draft went pretty immediately off the rails. But an hour or so late, we’d finished. Don’t read this until you’ve listened to or watched the episode, but here are the results:

As ever, we all think we won the draft. And who actually won is going to be hard to know for a while. (If you think you know who won, tell us! Comment here, email vergecast@theverge.com, or hit up the Vergecast Hotline at 866-VERGE11.) We’ll see what Fox’s upcoming streaming service looks like, whether Disney can make ESPN Flagship a true winner of a sports streamer, how long Apple and Amazon decide to keep throwing money at Hollywood, and whether TikTok even still exists in 2026. It sometimes feels like Netflix is the only truly safe bet in the business. No wonder it went first.