Streaming subscriptions in decline as UK households cut budgets

theguardian.com:

The UK streaming boom is officially over after the number of homes with services such as Netflix, Amazon and Disney+ fell in the first quarter, as the cost of living crisis forced hundreds of thousands of streaming fans to slim down their subscriptions to just a few favourites.

The number of UK homes that have at least one paid-for subscription streaming service fell by 215,000 in the first quarter – ending a decade of almost uninterrupted growth in the popularity of streaming services – as households cut budgets to cope as inflation runs at a three-decade high.

“With many streaming services having witnessed significant revenue growth during the height of Covid, this moment will be sobering,” said Dominic Sunnebo, the global insight director at Kantar Worldpanel, the publisher of the Entertainment on Demand report. “The evidence from these findings suggests that British households are now proactively looking for ways to save, and the subscription video-on-demand (SVoD) market is already seeing the effects of this.”

The unprecedented number of streaming services that are now in the market, at a time when living standards are forecast to suffer their biggest decline since the 1950s, means that ballooning home entertainment budgets that were sacrosanct during pandemic lockdown conditions are now being cut.

The Kantar Worldpanel report found that 16.9m UK households had at least one subscription service – although the average is 2.4 – at the end of the first quarter. While there were 1.29m new subscriptions to SVoD services in the UK in the first three months, this was outweighed by 1.51m cancellations, with more than half a million of those attributed to “money saving”.

Cutting back on streaming budgets looks set to increase,