Total viewership of Subscription TV in New Zealand has increased 4.9% from a year earlier to 2,823,000, an increase of 131,000.
The biggest increases over the last year have been experienced by the new Disney+ streaming service which launched in late 2019 and Amazon Prime Video.
Netflix is by far the most popular service and now watched by 2,141,000 people in an average four weeks, an increase of 92,000 (+4.5%) from a year ago.
In clear second place is Sky with 1,248,000 viewers. During the last year Sky purchased the Lightbox streaming service from Spark New Zealand and merged Lightbox into its own Neon streaming service in June 2020. Sky also includes the Sky Sport Now sports streaming service (formerly known as FAN PASS) which now has over 140,000 viewers.
In its first year of operation Disney+ has attracted an audience of 700,000 viewers equal to one-in-six New Zealanders and is already the third most popular Subscription TV service.
Also growing quickly over the past year is Amazon Prime Video which now has 323,000 viewers, an increase of 141,000 (+77.5%) on the December quarter 2019.
There are 481,000 New Zealanders now viewing one of multiple other services including Apple TV+, Spark Sport, Vodafone TV, YouTube Premium, Google Play and Tubi. Viewership of these services increased strongly over the last year up by 275,000 (+133.9%) on a year ago.
This new pay television data has been obtained from the Roy Morgan Single Source survey, derived from in-depth interviews with over six thousand New Zealanders each year.
Roy Morgan CEO Michele Levine says the new competition in the New Zealand subscription TV market over the last year with the entry of Disney+ means consumers have been the big winners with a wider variety of content available to view: