According to the latest Roy Morgan figures some 1.42 million Australians are viewing Netflix and it’s in some 559,000 homes across the country. The staggering thing here is it jumped 400,000 in June alone, up from one million viewers the month before.
Netflix subscription rates vary dramatically across different internet service providers and type of connection. When the US-based subscription video on demand (SVOD) service launched locally in March, fixed internet providers including Optus and iiNet made deals to offer inducements including extended free trials and unmetered streaming to new or existing customers.
By June, 16.8 per cent of households with fixed broadband through iiNet (or one of its standalone subsidiaries Internode, Westnet and Adam, all with equivalent deals), had Netflix—a rate almost three times the total norm of 6.1 per cent and exactly double the 8.4 per cent uptake rate among fixed broadband homes. Some 11.7 per cent of Optus’s fixed broadband customers had Netflix—almost 40 per cent above the fixed broadband norm.
In numbers, this means 113,000 Netflix homes are streaming through iiNet’s fixed broadband network, slightly more than the 102,000 using Optus despite the latter supplying fixed broadband to almost 200,000 more homes overall.
June 2015: % and Number of Households with Netflix, by Fixed Broadband Provider
Telstra has yet to dangle any Netflix-related carrots, but reportedly may be planning to soon. As of June, just 5.2 per cent of Telstra’s fixed broadband customers were using Netflix. However, even this below-average uptake was enough to give Telstra—due to sheer market dominance—more Netflix homes (142,000) than any other ISP.
Some 9.1 per cent of TPG’s fixed broadband homes (44,000) had Netflix in June. TPG was been rumoured to be negotiating its own unmetered Netflix deal. However our survey shows its customers are already over four times more likely to say they chose TPG because of unlimited data allowance in the first place, so ‘quota-free’ streaming is perhaps less of a lure.
Conversely, these results show that a quarter of Netflix customers have fixed broadband with Telstra, 20per cent with iiNet, Internode, Westnet or Adam, 18 per cent with Optus, and eight per cent with TPG. Another 13 per cent either have fixed broadband through a smaller provider (such as M2 Group’s brands Dodo and iPrimus) or didn’t know their home’s ISP. The remaining 16 per cent of Netflix subscribers don’t have fixed broadband—instead nearly of all of these streamers have some form of mobile broadband connection.
Currently an estimated 390,000 homes have an NBN internet connection—a new peak perhaps in part driven by appetite for SVOD: 9.6 per cent of NBN homes have Netflix.