Report: SVoD declining in Italy
January 2, 2024
From Branislav Pekic in Rome
The number of SVoD users in Italy has started to decline, according to a report from the Communications Regulatory Authority (Agcom) that covers the first nine months of 2023.
In September 2023, there were 15.3 million users, a slight decrease of 23,000 compared to the same month in 2022.
Netflix, the dominant player in the Italian market, saw its user base decline by 1.7 per cent to 8.8 million in the first nine months of the year.
Three platforms registered growth, namely Prime Video (+0.9 per cent to 6.5 million users), Disney+ (+0.9 per cent to 3.5 million users) and Sky’s Now (+16.4 per cent to 1.1 million).
Although DAZN saw a 10.8 per cent of average unique users to 2.1 million, the Agcom data refers to desktop and mobile traffic and does not include connected TV viewing.
Overall browsing time on SVoD platforms decreased by 9.4 per cent in September 2023 compared to September 2022. Netflix saw the biggest decline, by 6.6 per cent to 272 million hours. Prime Video (-23.2 per cent to 40 million hours), Disney+ (from 22 million hours to 18 million), and DAZN (from 8 million hours to 5 million) all confirmed the negative trend. The only major platform to see an increase in browsing time was Now, which grew by 22.2 per cent.
Free VoD platforms saw a 2.4 million decline in audience year-over-year to 36 million hours. Mediaset was the most popular, with 22.4 million average monthly unique users, ahead of Sky TG24 and RaiPlay with 9.7 million and 7.4 million users, respectively.
Viewing figures for terrestrial TV channels were also down, by 2.8 per cent to 8.07 million viewers on an average day, and by 2.5 per cent to 18.64 million in prime time.
During an average day, Mediaset has overtaken Rai as the leader in audience share, with 3.03 million viewers (37.5 per cent share) compared to 3.01 million (37.2 per cent share) for the public broadcaster. Discovery placed third with 680,000 viewers, followed by Comcast/Sky (610,000) and Cairo Communication/La7 (with 310,000).