Quarter of UK homes subscribe to Netflix

A quarter of UK homes subscribe to Netflix, with 1.4 million joining the streaming service in 2015 alone, says a BARB survey. More than five million households, or 24 per cent, subscribed to Netflix at the end of 2015, compared with 14 per cent in 2014.

Netflix far out sells competitors Amazon’s Prime Instant Video or Sky’s Now TV, and is continuing to grow faster than the other services. BARB says there are about 1.6 milion households subscribing to Amazon’s service in the UK, up around 300,000 over 2015, and fewer than 1 million signed up to Sky’s Now TV. In total more than 6.5 million households are signed up to some sort of video streaming service.

The figures are from a survey by TV ratings agency BARB. The survey also found that while 82 per cent of Netflix households only subscribed to one streaming service, about half of both Amazon and Now TV subscribers were also signed up to another provider.

BARB said that subscribers to services such as Netflix and Amazon are not using it to replace traditional TV viewing, including pay TV. The report says that Netflix and Amazon Prime households are “significantly more likely to be cable or Sky subscription homes than average”. However, this is not true of Now TV, which is specifically targeted at those consumers who only have terrestrial services. The figures also claim to show that almost a fifth of households do not have a TV.