Advanced Television

Netflix hits 1.5m subs in Italy

January 22, 2019

From Branislav Pekic in Rome

Netflix had 1.4 million paying subscribers in Italy last year and that number is expected to reach 2 million by the end of 2019.

The estimates come from Tony Gunnarsson, a media analyst at the consulting firm Ovum, reports daily Italia Oggi.

The video streaming platform, which arrived in Italy in November 2015, only provides aggregate data, divided between the US and the rest of the world.

According to Ovum’s estimates, the other major international competitor, Amazon Prime, which launched a year later, had about 2 million registered retail users in Italy in 2018. Of these, about 460,000 were Prime subscribers, who have access to Prime Video as part of the package. Some 300,000 of them are actively using PrimeVideo, i.e. they watch video content on a weekly basis.

The second major SVoD service in Italy after Netflix is, according to Ovum, Mediaset’s Infinity with 850,000 standalone OTT video subscribers (equal to 24 per cent of the market, compared to Netflix which has 44 per cent), followed by Amazon with 8 per cent of the market and about 300,000 active video users.

Other players include Tim Vision and Sky’s Now TV, which have a total of 690,000 subscribers, or 15 per cent of the market.

Overall, there were 4 million subscribers to OTT services like Netflix, compared to the 6.5 million subscribers for pay-TV services.

Gunnarsson expects pay-TV to decrease slightly in the coming years and OTT services to grow at higher rates than the current ones. By 2021, the number of OTT subscribers should be very close to those of the pay-TV subscriptions and in 2022 OTT will take the lead.

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