BARB: 18.8m UK homes have SVoD service
August 27, 2021
BARB, the UK’s television audience measurement currency, has released data from its Establishment Survey for Q2 2021. Due to restrictions on carrying out fieldwork during the pandemic, these are the first quarterly results released since Q3 2020.
The survey reveals that the number of UK households with a subscription to any SVoD service is now 18.8 million homes (66 per cent), up from 17.4 million in Q3 2020.
All of the main services have seen growth, with market-leader Netflix increasing to 16.8 million households in Q2 2021, up more than 1.5 million since Q3 2020.
Amazon Prime Video saw a larger growth in households than Netflix, increasing over 2.3 million homes to 12.5 million.
The largest percentage-change in the market was from Disney+, which is growing from a smaller subscriber base than Amazon and Netflix, having launched in March 2020. In Q2 2021, Disney+ was available in 4.8 million households, up 24 per cent since last time. Sky’s NOW also increased, to 2.3 million homes.
With the overall growth of 1.5 million homes lower than the aggregate growth for individual services, it’s also clear that more homes have multiple SVoD subscriptions. The proportion of homes with an SVoD service that subscribe to two or more services has risen to 65.3 per cent, up from 58.3 per cent in Q3 2020.
Justin Sampson, BARB’s Chief Executive, said: “BARB delivers a comprehensive understanding of what people watch. With over 1,000 interviews each week, the Establishment Survey is vital to how we achieve this. It’s the largest ongoing monitor of how the UK population can access broadcast channels, on-demand services and other streaming platforms. We are pleased to again publish robust insight on the ever-changing television landscape. The attraction of the new creates an inevitable focus on findings that show the continued growth of SVoD services. BARB will provide even more insight with the launch of daily viewing data for these and other streaming services later this year. This development reinforces our ability to meet the industry’s need for a trusted and impartial audience-measurement currency”