Almost one million fewer internet users watched SVOD services in Italy at the end of the first quarter than a year earlier.
According to figures published by the regulator AGCOM, the total at the end of March was 15,275,000, down 870,000 on the same month in 2022. On average, in the first three months of the year, Netflix recorded 8.9 million unique users (-3.6% compared to the same period of 2022), followed by Amazon Prime Video with 6.3 million visitors (-10.0%). Disney+, with an average of over 3.7 million internet users, and Sky/Now, with average unique users of 1.2 million, recorded growth (+5.8% and +15.3% respectively), while DAZN (2.3 million average unique users) recorded a decrease of -10.2% compared to the first three months of 2022).
There was also a decrease in the time spent watching SVOD services. Netflix went from around 99 million hours in the first three months of 2022 to 90 million hours in the same period of 2023, recording a 9.2% drop in hours dedicated to consulting its sites and applications. Similarly, Amazon Prime Video also showed a downward trend (-40.8%) in the time spent (from 21 million hours in the first quarter of last year to 13 million hours in the same period in 2023).
Similarly, Disney+ and DAZN saw a decrease in the total hours spent by users (from 8 to less than 5 million hours and from 3 to 2.5 million hours of browsing respectively) in the first three months of 2022 and 2023. For Sky’s Now service, on the other hand, there was an increase (+8.6%) in the hours spent on related sites or applications.
Significantly, there was also a contraction in the use of VOD platforms offering free services. They were used by 35,864,000 unique surfers in March, or 648,000 fewer than a year earlier. The most visited in terms of average monthly unique users were News Mediaset Sites (22.5 million), Sky TG24 (9.7 million) and RaiPlay (9.1 million).
