One in ten Kiwis have Netflix – Roy Morgan study

Research from Roy Morgan reveals that Netflix was reaching 398,000 New Zealanders only three months after its original launch. 

Roy Morgan first released the data on 28 October, but only sent out in a Roy Morgan email newsletter earlier today. 

The study, which tracked the uptake of Netflix between April and June, confirms that the SVOD provider was growing as quickly as industry commentators speculated it was.  

“As has been the case around the world, including Australia, New Zealand’s uptake of Netflix has been swift,” said John La Rosa, Roy Morgan’s general manager of client services . “These results, compiled over the first three months since Netflix landed, show that almost 400,000 Kiwis already have access to the 164,000 household subscriptions.”

The study showed that younger demographic groups, particularly young couples, were the most likely to have a Netflix subscription. 

The study also showed that Kiwis paying for Sky were just as likely as those without Sky to pay for a Netflix subscription.   

“Over half of New Zealand homes already have Sky, but that hasn’t stopped them from adding Netflix to their Pay TV mix—the rate of Netflix uptake among households with Sky has been virtually identical to the national norm of just under one in ten,” says La Rosa.

More recent data commissioned by Lightbox put the proportion of current Sky subscribers using Netflix at 18 percent (however, it is difficult to compare given that the research methodologies differed across the two studies). 

Given that this data only tracked the first few months of Netflix’s expansion into this market, the number of subscribers has no doubt shifted by now—and La Rosa says Roy Morgan will be releasing new data over time to show how the company is tracking.     

“As new data comes in, we’ll be monitoring the trend in SVOD uptake across providers, and exploring the impacts on traditional media consumption,” he says.