News & Views

Barb, the UK’s television audience measurement currency, has released data from its Establishment Survey for Q2 2021. The survey enables Barb to understand the characteristics of UK households, part of ensuring that our daily reporting of television audiences is representative of the whole population.

Due to restrictions on carrying out fieldwork during the coronavirus pandemic, these are the first quarterly results released since Q3 2020. Barb is pleased to confirm that the data are a fully-representative sample of the April-June 2021 period.

One element of the Establishment Survey results that is always of interest is the number of UK households with access to a subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) service. This update for Q2 2021 shows that access has continued to increase since our last release. The number of UK households with a subscription to any SVOD service is now 18.8 million homes (66%), up from 17.4 million in Q3 2020.

All of the main services have seen growth, with market-leader Netflix increasing to 16.8m households in Q2 2021, up more than 1.5m since Q3 2020. Amazon Prime Video saw a larger growth in households than Netflix, increasing over 2.3m homes to 12.5m. The largest percentage-change in the market was from Disney+, which is growing from a smaller subscriber base than Amazon and Netflix, having launched in March 2020. In Q2 2021, Disney+ was available in 4.8m households, up 24% since last time. NowTV also increased, to 2.3m homes.

With the overall growth of 1.5 million homes lower than the aggregate growth for individual services, it’s also clear that more homes have multiple SVOD subscriptions. The proportion of homes with an SVOD service that subscribe to two or more services has risen to 65.3%, up from 58.3% in Q3 2020.

Justin Sampson, Barb’s Chief Executive, said:

“Barb delivers a comprehensive understanding of what people watch.

“With over 1,000 interviews each week, the Establishment Survey is vital to how we achieve this. It’s the largest ongoing monitor of how the UK population can access broadcast channels, on-demand services and other streaming platforms. We are pleased to again publish robust insight on the ever-changing television landscape.

 “The attraction of the new creates an inevitable focus on findings that show the continued growth of SVOD services. Barb will provide even more insight with the launch of daily viewing data for these and other streaming services later this year. This development reinforces our ability to meet the industry’s need for a trusted and impartial audience-measurement currency”

From Q3 2020, Barb extended its definition of SVOD access to include households who have non-subscription access, such as via a trial period or a day-pass. The figures above reflect this wider definition.