Netflix hit hardest in Britons’ post-Christmas ‘subscription cull’
British households stopped paying for almost 170,000 streaming services in three months of the year, as increasingly budget-conscious consumers embarked on a post-Christmas “subscription cull” that hit market-leader Netflix the hardest.
While TV fans flocked to hit shows The Last of Us, Clarkson’s Farm and You – the three most popular shows on subscription video-on-demand services in the first three months – 7% of British households cancelled at least one service in a new year spending cut.
This amounted to the cancellation of 167,000 paid-for streaming subscriptions, taking the total number down to 29.44m, according to the research firm Kantar.
Almost 145,000 households gave up on paid streaming services all together in the first quarter, as the total number of homes with at least one paid-for subscription fell from 16.24m to 16.1m quarter on quarter.
The top reason given for households cutting subscriptions in the first quarter was: “I want to save money.”
Netflix is estimated to have recorded the largest loss in absolute subscriber numbers in the UK in the first quarter of the year. Amazon’s video service proved the most resilient, helped by an annual Christmas surge in sign-ups to the e-commerce giant’s Prime subscription bundle.
“Some services were more heavily impacted by this trend [of cutting back] than others,” said Dominic Sunnebo, global insight director at Kantar’s Worldpanel division.
On Tuesday, Netflix reported the addition of 1.75 million new subscribers globally in the first quarter, below investor expectations of 2.4 million, with the Europe, Middle East and Africa region adding just 640,000.
Netflix had attempted to tackle the subscriber slowdown by launching a cheaper, ad-supported tier in November – priced
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