The UK's appetite for streaming continues to grow, with over 20 million homes now subscribing to at least one SVOD service. This marks a significant milestone, with the number of households with access to an SVOD service surpassing 20 million for the first time since Barb began collecting data in 2014. The figure represents a 6.6% increase from Q2 2023, with 1.25 million more homes joining the ranks of SVOD subscribers.
Netflix's ad tier continues to gain traction, reaching 2.78 million homes (9.5%) in Q2, up from 2.12 million (7.4%) in Q1. The Disney+ ad tier, in its eighth month by the end of Q2, averaged in 820k homes across the quarter.
Netflix remains the most popular SVOD service in the UK, with 17.1 million homes (58.6%) having access. Amazon Prime Video follows closely behind with 13.7 million homes (46.7%), while Disney+ reaches 7.6 million homes (26.1%).
The number of homes with two or more streaming services also reached a new high of 14 million (48%). Doug Whelpdale, Head of Insight at Barb, stated: “More than 20m UK homes have access to an SVOD service for the first time since Barb began collecting data in 2014. This figure is 1.25m higher than in Q2 2023 – a 6.6% increase. The number of homes with two or more services also tipped to 14m (48%) for the first time. “The challenge will be to maintain this momentum. Q3 2024 will be a key test to see if the pure-play VOD services can avoid the plateaus of the last three years, but 2024 appears to be going well for these services so far.”
Barb's viewing data highlights the impact of new titles and library programming on time spent with streaming services. However, Barb cautions against directly comparing its data with figures provided by streaming services, as respondent recall of service access can be uncertain. This is particularly true when the respondent is not the subscriber or the service is bundled with others.