As Foxtel owned Binge and Kayo subscriptions climb, Netflix subscriptions are falling in Australia while their game play offering is being totally ignored globally.
Subscribers are ditching Netflix for the first since the US service was launched in 2015, the 3% fall comes as Foxtel’s Binge rose 22 per cent to 1.5 million.
It has been a torrid 18 months for the $US180bn giant streaming giant. In early 2022, subscriber numbers fell for the first time in a decade amid a siege from rival streaming services launched by media giants such as NBCUniversal, Disney and Apple and this is hurting.
Also failing to deliver both revenue and subscribers is their massive investment in gaming with the Netflix gaming platform failing to ignite interest among gamers similar to what happened to Google with their Strada platform.
Two years after the US streaming company announced a new gaming division, which started out offering mobile games to Netflix subscribers, the take-up remains shockingly low.
It was recently revealed that of Netflix’s 238 million global subscribers less than two million played its games on a daily basis – not even 1 per cent of users.
In Netflix’s quarterly earnings reports to the market, gaming now gets barely a mention claims the Australian.
Locally Research firm Telsyte’ s annual industry survey has found the rate of growth for streaming services has slowed.
Today there are eight platforms with more than one million subscribers in Australia.
“Profits, partnerships, and more aggressive behaviour. There’s going to be increasing competition to win people over from other platforms,” Telsyte’ s managing director, Foad Fodaghi, said. “If the market’s growing strongly, it’s growth, ‘co-opetition’ – all that. When it starts to tighten down, that’s when we see individual companies get more aggressive.”
According to the latest numbers, Amazon Prime Video was up 9 per cent to 4.5 million. Disney+ crept up 1 per cent to 3.1 million, and Stan rose 2 per cent to 2.6 million despite owner Nine Entertainment claiming 11% growth last week.
Foxtel’s Binge rose 22 per cent to 1.5 million, Paramount+ rose 41 per cent to 1.5 million and Kayo Sports jumped 8 per cent to 1.4 million.
Telsyte’ s annual study surveyed more than 1100 people in August and another 1030 people in December.