Households cancel 1.5 million streaming service subscriptions due to cost of living crisis, report says Business News

UK households have canceled streaming subscriptions in record numbers so far this year as families continue to grapple with rising living costs.

Just over 1.5 million video-on-demand accounts were taken down in the first three months of 2022, according to figures from market research firm Kantar, leaving platforms such as Disney+, Apple TV+ and Now concerned.

Netflix and Amazon Prime, on the other hand, have proven to be “last to go when households are forced to prioritize spending”.

More than half a million cancellations were attributed to “saving money”, with households instead budgeting for higher prices and energy bills, Kantar said. Young adults in particular have become reluctant to pay for television beyond the £159 annual license fee, the researchers found.

At the height of Covid – particularly during the lockdown – subscriptions to such platforms surged.

However, the researchers said the proportion of consumers planning to cancel subscriptions citing ‘wanting to save money’ as the main reason had risen to an all-time high of 38%, up from 29% in the last three years. month of 2021.

While that doesn’t mean houses have purged themselves of streaming subscriptions altogether – with 58% retaining at least one streaming service – the terminations do suggest viewers have become more apprehensive about the idea. to subscribe to several platforms.

Kantar said households are “getting serious about prioritizing where and how their disposable income is spent.”

Dominic Sunnebo, the global director of insight at Kantar, added that the latest research would be “sobering” for the industry. “Evidence from these results suggests that UK households are now proactively looking for ways to save,” he said.

It comes amid soaring energy, clothing and food prices in the UK, which pushed inflation to a 30-year high in March, according to data from the Office for National Statistics. (ONS) last week.

Kantar assessed various platforms’ churn rates – ie how many users they lost on a gross basis – which revealed that Britbox, Apple TV+ and Discovery+ suffered the more with the comings and goings.

Researchers say Amazon Prime’s thriller series Reach was the most watched title in the first quarter of the year, followed by ozark and Invent Anna on Netflix.

They added that although unsubscribe rates increased almost on all streaming platforms, there was a “clear difference” in the number of cancellations seen outside of Netflix and Amazon – going so far as to call the two “hygiene subscriptions for Britons: the last to go when households are forced to prioritize spending”.

Many consumers also continue to sign up for streaming services. Kantar’s research, based on interviews with 14,500 people, found that around 3% of UK households had taken out a subscription in January, February and March this year.

But this is a marked deterioration from the 4.2% who did so at the same time in 2021.

Media investors have reportedly worried that the rapid growth of video streaming – spurred by demand during the pandemic – has peaked.

Shares of Netflix, which is due to report first-quarter results on Tuesday, have fallen 43% so far this year as global subscriber numbers have disappointed.

The company admitted earlier this year that rival platforms were starting to have an impact, saying the competition “could affect our marginal growth”.