A survey has reported that almost 1 million UK households have cancelled streaming services - such as Netflix Inc, Amazon.com's Prime Video and The Walt Disney Co's Disney+ - so far this year amid the cost of living crisis.
The total number of UK homes that have at least one paid-for subscription has fallen by 937,000 between January and September, as cost-conscious households choose paying for essentials – such as energy, food and mortgage repayments – over home entertainment, according to the Kantar Worldpanel report.
“One million households have stopped streaming,” Dominic Sunnebo, the global insight director at Kantar Worldpanel said in a statement accompanying the survey results.
“The reason people are cancelling is the need to save money. The most recent quarter saw two of the most anticipated releases of the year, they ranked as the top two most enjoyed pieces of subscription video-on-demand content during the period, and yet we still saw a continuation of the negative trend of the market getting smaller," he added.
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The premiere of two of the most-hyped and expensive shows of all time – the $650mmln productions of JRR Tolkein's 'Rings of Power' and George RR Martin's 'House of the Dragon' – seem to have failed to prove a big enough draw to reverse a decline of another 234,000 homes with at least one paid streaming service in the third quarter of 2022.
Just over 16mln UK homes now pay for at least one subscription video-on-demand service according to Kantar Worldpanel. More than 5m homes have the three most popular services – Netflix, Prime Video and Disney+ – which together cost about £300 annually, according to media regulator Ofcom.
In the UK, Netflix accounted for almost a quarter of all UK households that changed or scrapped their streaming service in the third quarter, with 45% of those dropping out of the paid-for streaming market altogether.
While the number of UK households with streaming services continues to drop, the number of overall subscriptions continues to rise – the average home has 2.5 – as many streaming fans are still happy to add new services.
The launch of Paramount+, home to content such as 'Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' and 'Halo', helped drive up the total number of paid-for streaming subscriptions overall in the UK by 108,000 to 28.2 mln in the third quarter, Kantar Worldpanel said.
Overall, the report identified signs of stabilisation in the UK market in the run-up to Christmas, with the number of cancellations in the third quarter well down on the peak of 488,000 recorded in the second quarter of 2022.
The proportion of consumers planning to cancel streaming on-demand services stating the primary reason as “wanting to save money” is forecast to drop to 35% in the Christmas quarter, down from an all-time high of 38% in the first quarter. However, this remains much higher than the 24% recorded a year ago by Kantar.
“Consumers looked to have reached a stage where they had mostly cut the services they needed to cut and could manage that,” said Sunnebo.“But what we have seen over the last few weeks and the impact on people’s finances means there may be more downward pressure in the final quarter this year.”