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Report: SVOD outranks Pay TV

More Australians have SVOD than traditional Pay TV according to new data -however Foxtel is also up.

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Australians paying for TV: Pay TV, IPTV, or SVOD
Source: Roy Morgan Single Source, March 2013 – August 2016, six-month samples rolling quarterly, average sample n=15,447 Australians 14+

More Australians now have SVOD in their home than linear Pay TV according to data released by Roy Morgan Research.

In the six months to August 2016, 9.8 million Australians 14+ (50%) had access to one or more types of paid TV services in their home: Subscription Video on Demand (SVOD), Pay TV (linear, broadcast Foxtel channels), and Internet Protocol Television (IPTV).

5,595,000 Australians (28%) have SVOD subscriptions including Netflix, Stan, Presto, Quickflix, Foxtel Play and YouTube Red, while 5,309,000 (27%) have linear Pay TV, it claims.

However it also found Foxtel Pay TV in the home had risen over the period too, by an average of nearly 100,000 per quarter.

629,000 Australians have IPTV which includes both Fetch and Foxtel through T-Box, up around 100,000 since the beginning of the SVOD boom.

Michele Levine, CEO, Roy Morgan Research, says: “This week, Foxtel CEO Peter Tonagh announced the Pay TV provider plans to better compete with Netflix and Stan in the blossoming Subscription Video On Demand market by both enhancing and discounting Foxtel Play. At the ASTRA subscription media conference in Sydney, he reportedly highlighted that the ‘vast majority’ of TV viewing is still ‘live and linear’—that is, watched via a broadcast—but that Foxtel knows it still needs to develop some kind of competitive foothold in SVOD.

“Roy Morgan recently reported on just this trend in the Australian television landscape. Mr Tonagh’s claim is correct, with free-to-air television reaching nine in 10 Australians. However our latest research shows that, when it comes to paying for content, SVOD is already now more common than linear Foxtel.

“Foxtel’s long-term strength will, as Mr Tonagh noted, be in offering live sport and linear programming, including premium content sourced through its deal with HBO. However as more Australians choose to access content on demand, Foxtel will need to find creative ways to straddle both markets—which appeal to quite different people, with different budgets, tastes and habits.”

5 Responses

  1. I’m wondering why people do get svod. 9 out 0f 10 people have access to fta. A really popular show like “the block” might get a million on any given night. I’m in other peoples houses a lot and everybody always has the tv on. I’m assuming that people with ratings boxes keep forgetting to login the number of people watching because otherwise a lot of people have something that they don’t use i.e. fta, pay tv or svod. The figures don’t seem to equate with ratings.

    1. There are also alot out there who don’t watch FTA at all. I know some people who have no clue what The Block or Gogglebox is as they don’t watch FTA TV – I even know people who don’t own a TV – they watch everything online. It really depends who you know and what they do.

      1. I realize that there are people that don’t watch any tv but are they really such a huge majority? With 9/10 access to fta that means a potential audience if everybody turns on at once of around 22 million yet you rarely see the total audience above 4 million so around 18 million aren’t watching. Maybe the ratings should reflect this i.e. an audience of 1 million is a rating of 4.5%

        1. They mean 9/10 people watch some form of FTA, not that only 9/10 have access to it. A lot of SVOD shows are binge watched so it’s unlikely they’d be on when you are visiting unless you are there to watch as well. You also probably don’t know if they have got SVOD, Pay TV or YouTube on – that would be the usual case at my place and most other people I know – the TV is running so you assume it’s just FTA. A lot of people only have Foxtel for sport (or GOT!). There are so many different ways of watching content these days that it’s no surprise that FTA ratings are low. There are all the usual SVOD/pay options and then there are sites like YouTube who have a lot of different SVOD channels now. We apparently watch more content these days than in the past, just not on FTA.

  2. Foxtel beware! (And all other subscription-model pay TV companies for that matter).
    Stating the obvious perhaps but Netflix and to a lesser extent in the Australian market, Stan, have gone from nowhere to become reasonably significant players in less than two years. Foxtel – while a highly impressive in many ways – has been in the game over 20 years but has been bubbling around one-third market penetration for a good while now, I believe.
    Without its strong grasp on a lot of ‘blue ribbon’ premium and/or Aussie sporting codes, together with its important and recently renewed/extended HBO deal, I would think its popularity might be starting to slip a little by now. As the latest figures show this hasn’t happened yet, but the next few years will be very interesting to observe.
    More flexible packaging, and hanging on to a decent share of the must watch shows and sports will surely…

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