A new study from Ofcom claims that, between then, Netflix and Amazon made over £1bn from their combined streaming customers last year.
Netflix has 10m UK subscribers and they are said to have generated £693m for the company; meanwhile Amazon’s Prime Video service is said to have generated £400m from 7.7m subscribers.
ITV Hub, Channel 4’s All 4, Channel 5’s My5 and Sky’s Now TV (the UK’s main commercial broadcasters) combined made around £530m last year.
There will be inevitable comparisons with the music streaming market and lots of people asking why: a) the music DSPs in the UK do not have those sorts of subscriber numbers; and b) why the music DSPs in the UK do not have those sorts of revenues. There will also be questions about monthly pricing tiers for music subscription services which are higher than those for Amazon and Prime Video. There will be questions about how and if services can even increase prices, as Netflix is about to do in the UK on some of its tiers. There will also be questions about the effectiveness (or not) of bundling into a wider subscription package as Amazon does with many of its services. And there will be questions about hefty investment in original content on the scale that Netflix does it here. Yes, there are crossover issues here and there are also some general rules that could apply to music; but there are also vast differences in the consumer propositions, the wider TV and music ecosystems and the all-important context of consumption. Wondering why Netflix and Prime Video are achieving X while Spotify and Apple Music (et al) are achieving Y is a bit like asking why a lemon doesn’t taste like a lime.
Tools: platforms to help you reach new audiences
Tools: Kaiber
In the year or so since its launch, AI startup Kaiber has been making waves,…