Australian streaming, pay-TV surge
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Editor
| 19 March 2019

Nearly 14 million Australians now have access to some form of pay-TV/subscription TV, up 11.8% on a year ago, with large year-over-year increases for several subscription video-on-demand services says research from Roy Morgan.

The Single Source study found that this growth was not just being driven by the likes of Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, but also the local leader Stan and YouTube Premium.

In the three months to February 2019 over 11.2 million Australians had a Netflix subscription in their households, up by 25.2% compared with a year ago. The Foxtel pay-TV offer — including Kayo Sports — had 4.498 million customers, slipping back by nearly half a million subs over the previous 12 months. The leading Australian-owned SVOD was Stan — a fully owned subsidiary of the Nine Entertainment Company — which is now accessible by over 2.6 million Australians. This represented a huge 45.2% rise compared with a year ago.

Smaller SVOD services including YouTube Premium (formerly YouTube Red), Fetch and Amazon Prime Video also experienced significant increases in users over the last year. YouTube Premium (formerly YouTube Red), now has over 1.2 million users, up 31.9% on a year ago and Fetch now has nearly 760,000 users, up by 9% on a year ago. However the largest increase was for Amazon Prime Video which more than doubled its user base over the last year by 116.7% to over 570,000.

Commenting on the research, Roy Morgan CEO Michele Levine said: “Pay-TV/subscription TV services are an increasingly competitive marketplace in Australia. Going forward the battleground will be content and cost. To charge for a service there needs to be unique valued content e.g. live sport...Australia’s leading football code the AFL has been approached by well-known global streaming giants about acquiring the rights for the AFL when the next rights deal begins in 2023.”