1 Million Brits have cancelled subscriptions to streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime

The cost of Living crisis is having an effect on TV viewing consumption. Reports indicate that almost one million Brits have cancelled their subscriptions to streaming services including Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Disney+ so far this year.

According to London analytics firm Kantar, the number of UK homes with at least one paid-for video subscription fell by 937,000 between January and September. This is partly due to reducing outgoings to help pay for energy and food and partly due to “content fatigue” – an overwhelming amount of choice in content available.

Between July and September 2022, the number of British households subscribed to at least one video streaming service fell to 16.18 million – a drop of 234,000 compared to the quarter prior (April to June).

Despite being the world’s biggest streaming service, in the UK, Netflix took just a 2.1 per cent share of new subscribers from July and September.

This was less than Prime Video (29.4 per cent), Paramount+ (24.6 per cent), Disney+ (17.5 per cent), Apple TV (3.4 per cent) and more. 

We’ve previously touched on the news that Netflix has announced that it will be introducing a new ad-supported tier which will be launched in November at the cost of £4.99, this will be partly to benefit from ad revenue and partly to attract new subscribers for less cost and to void more cancellations. This Basic package will show an average of four to five minutes of adverts per hour, with each advert 15 or 30 seconds in length.

However the arrival of Paramount+ in the UK has actually seen an increase in the number of video-on-demand subscriptions in the UK rising to 28.2 million.

According to Kantar, Paramount+ enjoyed a successful launch and is already the fifth-largest video-on-demand service in the country, higher than both Discovery+ and AppleTV+. 

Overall, more than five million UK homes still have the three most globally popular video streaming services – Netflix, Prime Video and Disney+. 

It will be interesting to see how the battle of subscription channels continues over the coming months and what this will mean for linear TV channels as these audiences will likely increase. This in turn will benefit brands advertising on linear TV.

If you are thinking about advertising to large audiences on TV please contact our experienced team.

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