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UK households are increasingly embracing the cheaper ad-supported subscription tiers offered by SVoD platforms, according to data from Barb.

Findings from the audience measurement company’s latest Establishment Survey for the third quarter of 2024 showed that the number of homes on the Netflix ad tier had reached 3.8m, up from 2.8m in Q2 – an increase of more than a third (37%). As a proportion of UK households, those using ad tiers for Netflix were up 3.6 percentage points from 9.5% to 13.1%

Disney+’s ad tier is also building, averaging 1.2m (4.1% of UK households), a 46% jump from the 820,000 homes recorded in Q2.

A whopping 86% of homes with Amazon Prime Video are on the ad tier, due to changes in the platform’s tiering, which saw the basic Prime Video service have adverts added to it, with subscribers able to pay a higher fee for an ad-free service. 11.5m (39.3%) homes now have Prime Video with ads.

Amazon was the only service to have gone down in terms of overall access in households, dipping from 13.7m households in Q2 to 13.4m in Q3.

The survey showed that 20.1m UK homes (68.8% of all UK households) had access to video-on-demand services in Q3 of this year, a slight increase from the 20m recorded in Q2. Overall, Netflix remains the most common SVoD with 59% of all UK homes – 17.3m – having access to the streamer. This was up from 17.1m in Q2.

Apple TV+ also saw fractional growth over the quarter, with 2.5m homes accessing the service in Q3, up the 2.4m in Q2. Now TV is also available to 2.1m homes in Q3 compared with 1.98m in Q2.

Both Paramount+ and Discovery+ have retained their Q2 levels, with 2.8m and 3.2m households respectively having access to the streamers across Q2 and Q3.

Despite an increase in household access to streamers, the number of subscriptions per household dipped, which Barb suggested could be down to belt-tightening.

Doug Whelpdale, head of insight at Barb, said after strong growth in the first half of this year, it was “perhaps inevitable that the growth in homes accessing subscription VoD services would slow.”

“The overall number of homes accessing at least one SVoD service remained above 20m, but the number with more than two services dipped to below 14m homes. Suggesting viewers continue to remain wary of economic turbulence.”

This story first appeared on Screen’s sister site Broadcast