A newly-released Kantar report has today revealed that close to 1 million UK households have cancelled their streaming subscriptions this year, as they face mounting living costs resulting from the global economic crisis.
The ongoing cost-of-living squeeze has led Britons to re-prioritise what essential purchases consist of, and it would appear that for many, streaming services are superfluous.
Despite the premiere of flagship streaming-only series in the past few months including Rings of Power and House of the Dragon, these big-name, big-budget releases have failed to stem the torrent of customers quitting streaming services – another 234,000 in the third quarter alone.
The report indicates that although slightly more than 16 million UK households are subscribed to at least one streaming service, this number is down significantly by 937,000 from January to September this year, at a time when streaming platforms are investing bigger and bigger sums in a desperate bid to retain customers.
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“One million households have stopped streaming,”Kantar Worldpanel global insight director, Dominic Sunnebo said.
“The reason people are cancelling is the need to save money. The most recent quarter saw two of the most anticipated releases of the year, they ranked as the top two most enjoyed pieces of subscription video-on-demand content during the period, and yet we still saw a continuation of the negative trend of the market getting smaller.”
An increasingly nervous Netflix last week confirmed plans to roll out an ad-supported tier across 12 global markets this November, amid reports that it had lost over a million subscribers globally since the turn of the year.
