Barb, the industry’s standard for understanding what people watch, unveiled the findings of its Establishment Survey on 15 August. According to the data, 20m UK homes (68.7%) had access to a subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) service in Q2 2024, up from 19.5m UK homes (67.9%) in Q1. This number is also the highest it has been since Barb first started collecting data.
Doug Whelpdale, Head of Insight at Barb, commented: ‘More than 20m UK homes have access to an SVOD service for the first time since Barb began collecting data in 2014. This figure is 1.25m higher than in Q2 2023 – a 6.6% increase. The number of homes with two or more services also tipped to 14m (48%) for the first time. Building on strong growth in Q1 all services on the tracker saw a quarterly increase in the number of homes with access.’
Barb’s study uncovered that the number of UK homes paying for the Netflix and Disney+ ad tiers is growing. More specifically, 2.78m (9.5%) homes — up from 2.12m (7.4%) — have a Netflix ad tier subscription. Meanwhile, now in its eight month, the newly-launched Disney+ ad tier has averaged 820k homes.
The following increases were also recorded in Q2:
- Netflix: 17.1m homes (58.6%), up from 6.7m (58%) in Q1.
- Amazon Prime Video: 13.7m homes (46.7%), up from 13m (45.3%) in Q1.
- Paramount+: 2.8m homes (9.7%), up from 2.6m (9.1%) in Q1.
- Discovery+: 3.2m UK homes (11.1%), up from 3.1m (10.9%) in Q1.
- NOW: 1.98m UK homes (6.8%), up from 1.82m (6.3%) in Q1.
Disney+ and AppleTV+ subscriptions remained the same, at 7.6m (26.1%) and 2.4m (8.3%), respectively.
Further commenting on the results, Whelpdale said:
‘Netflix added just under 0.9m homes since Q4 2023, while Amazon gained almost 1.3m in the first half of 2024. The challenge will be to maintain this momentum. Q3 2024 will be a key test to see if the pure-play VOD services can avoid the plateaus of the last three years, but 2024 appears to be going well for these services so far.’
Featured image: Bastian Riccardi / Unsplash
