Tuesdata: How Amazon Prime Video has been winning the battle for new Aussie subscribers
Tuesdata: How Amazon Prime Video has been winning the battle for new Aussie subscribers
Welcome to Tuesdata, our weekly analysis for Unmade’s paying members.
Today, we take a look at the state of streaming in Australia, analysing data from sources including Samba TV, Telsyte and Kantar. The numbers suggest that Amazon Prime Video and Paramount+ are beginning to emerge as counter intuitive winners.
Further down, a bad day for ARN Media and Seven on the Unmade Index.
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The streamers overtake the broadcasters
Television’s future has arrived.
After 60 years of the three-horse race of Seven versus Nine versus Ten (and 30 years of advertising on SBS) the free to air players are now competing in a field of more than a dozen major players battling for viewers’ eyes.
The subscription streaming space includes Amazon Prime Video, Binge, Kayo, Stan, Disney+, Netflix, Apple TV+, Britbox, Paramount+ and even YouTube Premium.
The purely ad-supported space is almost as competitive, with 9Now, 7plus and Tenplay taking on FAST (free ad-supported television channels) from TV manufacturers as well as the likes of YouTube and short form video consumption via social platforms.
With so much additional choice, no wonder broadcast audiences are falling.
The annual Media Consumption Survey, commissioned and published by the Australian Communications and Media Authority, suggests that broadcast television is now the third most common way of watching TV.
Until 2020, commercial free to air TV (watched over the airwaves) was the most common way to consume screen content, with 61% of people doing that every week. Two years on, that number had fallen to 53%, while in the same period subscription streaming services jumped from 60% to 66%.
Free BVOD services are now the second most common, rising from 54% to 58% of people in the same two-year period.
However, there is by no means a definitive winner in the new battleground. Yet.
Different data sets offer different parts of the picture. Research house Kantar releases quarterly information about share of new subscribers, based on a panel survey. Audience analytics company Samba TV looks at viewing habits. And Telsyte conducts its own quarterly local consumer survey.
The Samba TV data, published within the last fortnight, demonstrates how things have changed.