The SVOD Report found that 11.6 million homes in the UK had at least one of Netflix, Amazon Prime Video or Now TV in Q3 2018 – a year on-year increase of 22% while the number of homes with two or more services rose from 2.8 million to just under 4 million ( 40% increase) in the past year.

Netflix is the main driver of the increase – adding 2.2 million homes compared to Q3 2017. Amazon added more than a million homes, while Now TV has added just under 200,000.

The Report explores the rise of unidentified viewing, generally thought to be streamers such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Now TV, which do not sign up to Barb’s measurement system. Unidentified viewing has risen from 40 to 46 minutes per day.

In terms of who is subscribing to these services, 64% of households that subscribe to any of the three SVOD services are ABC1, well ahead of the 53% that ABC1s represent in the UK population overall.

While Netflix and Now TV are both in line with this average, with 63% ABC1 households, Amazon has an ABC1 profile of 73% – indexing 38% ahead of the UK average.

Barb speculated that this difference is explained by more affluent families with young children using Amazon because of Prime’s additional “carrot” of next-day delivery of urgently needed household items.

Barb points out that unidentified viewing is still just under a fifth of the time spent with the TV set, and not all unidentified viewing is to SVOD services – it also includes games playing on consoles and watching programming more than 28 days after broadcast.

To better understand this type of viewing, Barb is investigating using meters attached to broadband routers in panel homes to identify SVOD viewing. Kantar Media and Nielsen have both started deploying this new type of metering technology in other countries and Barb is testing router meters from both companies.