A leading UK analyst has said Netflix now has 1.5 million UK subscribers and is edging towards two million.
“While BT Sport makes all the headlines, Netflix has released almost nothing publicly since announcing last August that it had broken the one million barrier,” said Enders Analysis. The report suggested that the growth in subscriber numbers had come at the expense of its Amazon-owned rival Lovefilm.
Enders chractarises the Netfilx subscriber as pay-TV households and younger adults who have not yet set up more permanent households, but generally live in free-to-air TV dwellings and enjoy the occasional “binge”.
The comments chimed with Kevin Spacey, the actor-director who appeared in the recent Netflix production House of Cards. Delivering the MacTaggart Lecture to the Edinburgh Television Festival, Spacey said: The audience wants control. They want freedom. If they want to binge – as they’ve been doing on House of Cards – then we should let them binge”.
House of Cards was released simultaneously of Netflix, which has made much of its originals, even though they are dwarfed by acquired content. However, the ‘boxed set’ marketing principal has served the online service well through shows such as Breaking Bad that have developed a cult following, despite not being available on a mainstream UK channel.
Enders suggests that Netflix would do better still were it to gain carriage on Sky or Virgin Media, pointing out that while Netflix can be found on the Roku TV box, it is absent from Sky’s Now TV version.
