The UK’s streaming market has again lost viewers as the cost of living crisis continues to bite.
According to Kantar’s Entertainment on Demand Q2 UK streaming market data, a further half a million viewers have unsubscribed from a streaming service between April and June 2022.
The decline is being driven by the youngest households, says the report. Households with under 24s present saw SVoD penetration drop by 2.6%points compared to a drop of just 0.5%. in 55–64-year-old households.
Between April and Jun 2022, the number of VoD-enabled households that subscribed to at least one video streaming service in Great Britain fell to 16.42million, down 488,000, quarter on quarter and representing 56 per cent of households, said Kantar. This follows a fall of 215,000 in the first quarter of this year. The 56% of households compares to 58% in Q1/22 and 57% of households in Q2/21
The proportion of consumers planning to cancel SVoD services and stating the primary reason as ‘wanting to save money’ dipped slightly from an all-time high in Q1 2022 (38%) to 36% in Q2’22, but remains significantly heightened from a year ago (24%)
Dominic Sunnebo, global insight director, Kantar, Worldpanel Division, said: “In Q2, we observed how British consumers continued to cancel subscriptions across the board. In terms of the TV streaming market, the decline in subscriptions is being driven largely by younger ages. Although, it is worth noting that this group often have a wider variety of entertainment sources, including BBC iPlayer and free services such as TikTok, suggesting that this age is still interested in viewing TV streaming, just for a lower cost.
“Disney performed well in Q2 because of its broad and diverse content inventory whereas AppleTV’s success in the UK market came because of focusing on local content, such as popular British TV shows. With Netflix announcing its partnership with Microsoft to build an advertisement-supported tier of its streaming service, it will be interesting to see how it performs in the next quarter against its competitors,” he added.
