Barb, the industry’s standard for understanding what people watch, has released data from its Establishment Survey showing that 20.1m UK homes (67.5%) had access to a subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) service in Q1 2025. This is a slight increase from 20m UK homes in Q4 2024.
In Q1 2025, 17.4 million UK households, or 59.2%, had access to Netflix, up from 17.1 million in Q4 2024. Of these, 4.8 million homes (28% of Netflix users, or 16.4% of UK households) were on its ad-supported tier, a slight increase from 4.7 million in the previous quarter. Amazon Prime Video reached 13.4 million UK homes (45.7%), also edging up from 13.3 million in Q4. Notably, 87% of Prime Video households—11.7 million homes (39.9%)—were on its ad tier, reflecting a marginal rise from 11.6 million. Disney+ saw a decline, reaching 7.3 million homes (24.8%), down from 7.6 million, though ad-tier adoption grew to 1.7 million homes (5.8%), up from 1.5 million. Discovery+ maintained a steady footprint of 3.1 million homes (10.6%), unchanged from the previous quarter. Paramount+ expanded to 3.1 million households (10.5%), rising from 2.7 million, while Apple TV+ reached 2.7 million homes (9.1%), up from 2.6 million. Meanwhile, NOW dropped to 1.8 million homes (6.2%), down from 2 million in Q4 2024.
Doug Whelpdale, Head of Insight at Barb said: “20.1m UK homes accessed at least one pure-play VOD service in Q1 2025, showing continued stability in the market. The number of homes with two or more services grew for the first time since Q2 2024, reaching a new high watermark of almost 14.1m homes. Paramount+ was the service with the largest growth in the absolute number of homes, adding 430k over the quarter to stand +16% on Q4 2024 and +19% on Q1 2024. The latest series of 1923 was a notable content release for the service in Q1, but another factor may be the release of Yellowstone series 1-4 on Netflix at the end of January. During Q1, series five of Yellowstone accounts for five of the top ten most-viewed programmes on Paramount+ that were not new releases. Potentially those viewing on Netflix went on to join Paramount+ to find out what happens at the end of the series.”
Streaming services with a household penetration of more than 5% are reported.
Caution should be applied when comparing Barb’s sample-based numbers to audited numbers published by the SVOD services. Respondent recall of access to these services is subject to some uncertainty – this could occur where the respondent is not the subscriber in the household, or the service is provided in a package with other services.