It’s official! After a few months in the local industry, Netflix has cemented itself as the Aussie king of streaming services. a survey conducted by Roy Morgan found that Netflix has ticked over 1 million subscribers in Australia – outstripping its nearest opponent by a not surprising 10:1.
The research – conducted from a sample size of 2,088 Australians aged 14 and over – found that Netflix now has as many as 1.039 million local subscribers, and its nearest rival has not even cracked six figures. Second place goes to Presto – the joint venture between Seven and Foxtel with just 97,000 subscribers, followed closely by the Nine and Fairfax-backed Stan which has 91,000.
The struggling Quickflix and the “didn’t actually know it existed” Foxtel Play lag even further behind that, with 43,000 and 40,000 people on board respectively.
The magically million mark for Netflix comes from numbers taken in May, and shows a rise on the initial number of 766,000 from April – the first full month of Netflix availability within Australia.
The survey also noted that some 5 million homes are still dependent on the Foxtel/Pay-TV subscription, we can however look at the large adoption of Netflix numbers after only 3 short months as a sign of a growing trend of acceptance of digital streaming services in Australian households and that they can in fact work.
Quickflix CEO Stephen Langsford took an expected raff at the numbers saying
“We don’t know how you can get anything sensible quoting millions of subscribers from a survey of only 2,000 respondents,” ignoring the concept of statistical data gathering and sample sizes. He added, “Those respondents look like they include 14-years-old but you need a valid credit card (and therefore be 18-years-old) to subscribe,” again, ignoring the presence of Visa Debit cards, as well as the existence of Mum and Dad.
It is clear that Langford is struggling to keep the outdated Quickflix service relevant, in an industry of big players who know how to run things properly. Langford is known for his outlandish comments (as we have covered in the past) and as we have asked him before, to update their model and services to rival the newly created competition in the marketplace.
Be sure to check out The Streaming Show coming soon to Novastream, a weekly podcast covering the best of Netflix, Stan & Presto.
