Netflix keeps on growing since its local launch earlier in the year, having surpassed the 1 million household mark in October, according to Roy Morgan Research data.While October’s growth was less steep than previous months, Netflix still added 71,000 households over the course of the month, bringing it to a total of 1,039,000 households (2,677,000 Australians 14-plus), representing 11.4 per cent of Australian households, Roy Morgan found.
Netflix has attracted significant numbers of first-time pay TV subscribers, with Roy Morgan noting that in the year preceding its arrival over seven in 10 Australians lived in a home without any pay TV service, with this having declined to 58 per cent as of October.
 |
Meanwhile, the rise of SVOD could be impacting Australians’ DVD and downloading habits.
Roy Morgan figures show 20.6 per cent of Australians bought a DVD and 15.3 per cent rented one in an average three-month period in the six months to September 2014, which had declined to 19.3 per cent and 12.4 per cent, respectively, during the six months after Netflix’s launch. The rate of downloading TV or movies has declined from 10.8 per cent a year ago to 9.1 per cent now.
 |
“The trends suggest it may not be long before the majority of Australian homes are paying for TV content through one or more pay or subscription TV providers,” Tim Martin, Roy Morgan Research general manager – media, commented.
“The impacts of Netflix, as well as Foxtel’s broadening range of options and now Telstra TV, will be felt across multiple areas: from the reach of commercial television and how much time we spend watching free-to-air channels, to our internet data limits and uptake of the NBN, sales of DVDs and Blu-rays, and our attitudes to what content we’ll pay for and what we expect to get for free.
“Australians have been notorious for their high levels of illegal downloading. While our figures of course include legal downloads, it is notable that the younger, tech-savvy people most likely to download TV shows and movies have been the quickest to subscribe to Netflix, and the overall rate of downloading has declined.”
