Amazon’s increased interest in sports rights has been rewarded with a rise in the number of Amazon Prime Video subscribers.
Kantar’s Entertainment on Demand barometer says that during Q4 an additional 1.3 million UK households took out a new video streaming subscription with almost half of these going to Amazon.
Subsequently, Amazon has been added to the Sky Q platform and can be expected to add further subscriptions in the first quarter of the new year.
In addition to increasing overall Prime membership, now at 53% of UK households, Amazon also saw an increase in the proportion of Prime members using Prime Video, rising to 62.6% up from 60.5% the previous quarter.
The combination of Premier League football, international rugby and tennis was the carrot for more than 1 in 4 new subscribers over the quarter. The Boys continues to perform well for Amazon, showing as the number 4 most enjoyed SVOD title during Q4.
16.7 million British households held at least one SVOD subscription by the end of 2020 – 12.9m SVOD subscriptions were taken out in the UK last year.
Source: Kantar
Another beneficiary has been BritBox, the ITV-BBC streaming service, which overtook Now TV and Apple TV for the first time in Q4 in terms of new subscribers. Content was labelled as a key driver by 33% of the new subscribers with the rebooted Spitting Image a key title.
Disney+ held a double digit share of new SVOD subscribers throughout 2020 and received the most new signups across the year. Disney+ is also showing good progress in bringing its retention rate under control, with customer churn of just 6% in Q4, almost half that of its churn rate in Q2.
The proportion of streaming viewing now being watched through a smart TV grew to 52% in Q4 as streaming stick viewing continues to fall.
However, almost 1 in 6 British homes use TV sticks/dongles to access their SVOD services, with Amazon Fire TV dominant in this category (with 74% share), compared to 13% for Roku, 5% for AppleTV and 4% for Google Chromecast.
