Italy: Only Rai sees audience growth in 2021
May 6, 2022
From Branislav Pekic in Rome
Rai was the only major Italian broadcaster to register an audience growth in 2021 compared to the previous year, according to data published by the Communications Authority (AgCom).
The public broadcaster had an average daily audience share of 36 per cent (+0.8 per cent), ahead of Mediaset with 31.9 per cent (-0.2 per cent), Discovery Italia with 7.4 per cent (-0.3 per cent), Comcast/Sky Italia with 6.2 per cent (-0.3 per cent) and Cairo Communications/La7 with 3.7 per cent (-0.2 per cent).
The ‘other channels’ category registered 0.2 per cent growth to 14.8 per cent of the total audience. The overall prime time audience in Italy dropped from 25.26 million in 2020 to 23.45 million in 2021 (-7.2 per cent), while the average daily audience was also down from 11.08 million to 10.05 million (-9.3 per cent). An estimated 16.4 million unique users logged on to VoD services in December 2021 (+750,000 compared to 2020).
Netflix saw the number of unique users go up from 7.5 million to 8.7 million in the period; Prime Video went down from 6.1 million to 6 million; Disney+ was also down from 3 million to 2.6 million; DAZN went from 1.5 million to 2.4 million; while Now dropped from 1.3 million to 1 million.
Italians spent 47 million hours on SVoD platforms in December 2021, equivalent to an average of 2h52m per user.
AgCom also said that Italy had 2.65 million FTTH, 10.22 million FTTC, 1.70 million FWA and 4.10 million DSL accesses.