UK’s SVOD subscriptions cross 20 million barrier for first time

Barb’s Establishment Survey showed that 20m UK homes (68.7%) had access to an SVOD service in the second quarter of 2024. This is a slight increase from 19.5m UK homes (67.9%) in the first quarter.

The Barb data revealed that 17.1m UK homes (58.6%) had access to Netflix in the second quarter 2024 up from 16.7m (58%) in Q1.

Meanwhile, 13.7m UK homes (46.7%) had access to Amazon Prime Video, up from 13m (45.3%). By comparison, 7.6m UK homes (26.1%) had access to Disney+ in the second quarter, which was flat compared to Q1.

3.2m UK homes had access to Discovery+, 2.4m to Apple TV+, 2.8m to Paramount+ , and 1.98m to Now TV.

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Barb’s Survey also shared an advertising tier estimate for Netflix, alongside a first figure for those with access to the Disney+ ad tier.

The number of UK homes on the Netflix ad tier reached 2.78m (9.5%) from 2.12m (7.4%) in Q1. The Disney+ ad tier, in its eighth month by the end of the second quarter, averaged in 820k homes across the quarter.

Doug Whelpdale, Head of Insight at Barb, said: “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.

“Building on strong growth in Q1 all services on the tracker saw a quarterly increase in the number of homes with access. Netflix added just under 0.9m homes since Q4 2023, while Amazon gained almost 1.3m in the first half of 2024.

“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.”

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