Australian SVOD Base Tops 10 Million

More than half of Australians over the age of 15 pay for at least one SVOD service, according to AMPD Research, a subsidiary of Media Partners Asia, with Netflix alone having 5.3 million customers.

The total SVOD subscriber base in Australia reached 10.2 million as of April of this year. One in four homes pays for Netflix and one in five subscribe to a dedicated sports service. The average home is spending about A$35.30 (US$24.86) per month for 1.9 SVOD services. The average user spends about ten hours a week watching TV series and movies on an SVOD service; including sports, this goes up to more than 12 hours. Behind Netflix in subscriber numbers is Stan with 1.4 million, and then YouTube Premium with just over a million. Amazon Prime Video has about 600,000 and then Foxtel Now has 500,000.

“Our latest survey confirms that Australian consumers have embraced subscription streaming services at a pace that is unmatched in any other major developed economy we have examined,” said Anthony Dobson, managing director of AMPD Research. “We are seeing impressive adoption rates across demographics, with 52 percent of the under 45s paying for video streaming services, while take-up among those over 45 is around 48 percent. That underscores how paying for streaming video is becoming mainstream behavior in Australia.”

Dobson further notes that Australians are generally happy about their SVOD services. “We employed the Net Promoter Score (NPS) method which reflects subscriber willingness to recommend services to other people. The SVOD sector as a whole has a positive NPS of 15, lifted substantially by Netflix. Dedicated sports services fared less well with a lower but still positive Net Promoter Score of 2. Netflix remains the service to beat with an impressive NPS score of 41. Netflix also recorded the highest average viewing time for a non-sports service as well as the largest paying base and share of revenue among all SVOD services in Australia.”

Stan is second in terms of revenue share, ahead of Foxtel Now, which registered the highest average spend among its paying base, driven by its A$29 (US$20) per month sports pack add-on.

In terms of content preferences, 75 percent of respondents want more locally produced content on SVOD, and 58 percent want more British and American shows. SVOD subscribers are seemingly content with the amount of sports and kids’ content, but these are likely to be key SVOD battlegrounds in the future as pay-TV prices increase. About half of Australia’s pay-TV homes are also SVOD homes.

“Competition for spend and viewing time is only likely to increase, driven by rising investment in original content as well as access to local and international sports,” Dobson said. “At the same time, Disney’s upcoming streaming service Disney+ will likely arrive in Australia sooner rather than later as part of its global rollout, undoubtedly becoming a key player in the Australian market.”