Among the leading video-on-demand providers, Amazon Prime has the highest number of titles on offer in the United Kingdom (UK) as of December 2024. In total, it offered over ****** titles, compared to Netflix’s *****. However, Netflix is the service with the most TV shows on offer, while movies is where Amazon Prime stands out with over ****** titles compared to Netflix’s ***** films. Netflix dominates the video-on-demand market Despite Amazon Prime’s large media library, Netflix has remained the better performing video-on-demand service in the United Kingdom. As of the fourth quarter of 2024, the platform had around **** million subscribers, while Amazon Prime had **** million. Having emerged in 1997 as the world’s first entertainment streaming service, Netflix has managed to stay ahead of its competitors. Today, its strength lies in its original series content, many of which have gathered worldwide acclaim. Indeed, the platform regularly dominates the ranking of popular streaming shows in the UK. Pricing and quality strategies Despite the vast content libraries, streaming services face significant challenges, and content alone may not guarantee retention. A 2024 survey revealed that rising prices was the primary reason for over ** percent of UK consumers to cancel streaming subscriptions. In fact, as competition intensifies, providers are adjusting their strategies, with plans to not only reduce content spending but also to grow their subscription fees. As the market matures, streaming platforms are likely to focus more on targeted, high-quality content rather than sheer amount to maintain their competitive edge and subscriber base.

The UK video downloading and streaming services industry has undergone substantial transformation recently, driven by technological advancements and an influx of diverse content. By December 2023, the industry's top platforms boasted a staggering 100,000 hours of content, according to IBISWorld, luring subscribers with captivating titles like House of Dragon and The Rings of Power. Market concentration in the industry is exceptionally high. Netflix Inc, Amazon Digital UK Ltd, The Walt Disney Company Ltd and Sky UK Ltd dominate the scene. Collectively, they account for over 90% of revenue with their platforms Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+ and NOW TV. Revenue is expected to mount at a compound annual rate of 8.6% to £2.6 billion over the five years through 2024-25. Hikes in household disposable income, mobile connections and online expenditure have expanded viewers' appetite for videos accessed on-demand. Revenue surged in 2020-21 with the pandemic confining people to their homes because of lockdowns. More leisure time saw customers looking for more content on various platforms, boosting subscriptions. Revenue is forecast to climb by 5.5% in 2024-25, with the profit margin widening to 6.7%. Streaming will continue to transform, with many companies entering the crowded market. The success of ITVX, Paramount+ and Max will shape future revenue. It will ramp up competition to capture viewers' attention. It will boost UK subscriptions but impact individual platforms' ability to retain customers, facilitating substantial revenue growth. Rising technology adoption, changing viewing habits and expanding content libraries will drive industry growth. New platforms, premium content exclusivity and technological breakthroughs, like adaptive bitrate streaming, will drive growth. Over the five years through 2029-30, video downloading and streaming platforms' revenue is forecast to climb at a compound annual rate of 6.2% to £3.5 billion. The recent crackdown on password sharing by Netflix and its move to introduce ad-supported tiers reflect broader trends of platforms adapting to optimise revenue streams and enhance user experience. By 2026, Max's anticipated launch in the UK will likely shake up the industry further, as existing services, mainly Sky's NOW TV, face new competitive pressures.

Netflix continues to dominate the UK streaming landscape, with **** million households subscribing to the service in the first quarter of 2025. This marks a significant increase from **** million subscribers in the same period of the previous year, demonstrating the platform's enduring popularity despite fierce competition in the video-on-demand landscape. Netflix's competitors While Netflix remains the leading subscription video-on-demand service in the UK in terms of customer numbers, Amazon Prime Video boasts the largest content library among major SVOD platforms, with over **** thousand hours of content available as of May 2024. However, when it comes to market share based on user interest, Netflix still holds the top spot, edging out providers such as Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, and Apple TV+. Demographic preferences Interestingly, streaming preferences vary across age groups. Among viewers aged 65 and above, Amazon Prime Video is the preferred choice in the UK for ** percent, while Netflix captures one-third of this demographic. This contrasts with the overall market dominance of Netflix, suggesting that older audiences may have different content preferences. The generational divide in streaming habits is further illustrated by data from Flanders in Belgium, where millennials show a slightly higher Netflix usage rate compared to Gen Z, both significantly outpacing older age groups.

The UK streaming market remains highly competitive, with Netflix maintaining its lead despite facing strong competition. As of March 2025, Netflix held a ***** percent market share, closely followed by Amazon Prime Video at ***** percent. This narrow gap between the top two players highlights the intense battle for viewers in the British streaming landscape.

In March 2024, YouTube.com was the leading video streaming website in the United Kingdom. During the measured period, the video platform accounted for over 71.7 percent of desktop traffic in the arts & entertainment - TV, movies, and streaming subcategory. Netflix was ranked second with an 6.52 percent market share.

In the third quarter of 2024, Netflix was the most popular subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) service in the United Kingdom, capturing a market share of ** percent based on users' interest in adding content to their watch lists. Amazon Prime Video followed closely with a market share of ** percent, while Disney+ ranked third with a market share of ** percent.

The results of a survey on the leading video streaming and downloading services in the United Kingdom (UK) found that Netflix was the most popular streaming service as of the fourth quarter of 2021. More than four fifths of respondents stated that they used Netflix to watch TV, series, or movies.

Growing popularity of Netflix and Amazon Prime

Among the top services, both Netflix and Amazon Prime Video demonstrated growth between 2017 and 2021. In contrast, the popularity of platforms such as BBC iPlayer, ITV Hub and All 4 decreased. A survey conducted in 2018 showed that when asked why they used video-on-demand services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime, the top reasons cited by respondents included watching original series and content not available elsewhere, and being able to watch multiple episodes in a row, unlike some catch-up services which only host episodes for a maximum of 30 days.

Focus on original content

In order to stand out from other video streaming services, both Netflix and Amazon Prime Video have consistently focused on building up their content base. Despite Amazon Prime Video boasting over 20 thousand titles as of February 2021 compared to 6,024 on Netflix, it appears that the latter’s appeal lies in the popularity and demand of its original content. As a company solely focused on digital video streaming, Netflix is also dedicated to growing its product, and continues to inject more into its video content budget each year, reaching 17 billion U.S. dollars as of 2021. In the same year, Amazon only allocated 13 billion dollars for its video content segment.

Following the switch to digital TV, the TV programming industry now has thousands of channels and is dominated by subscription packages. TV broadcasters have benefitted from the lower cost of operating channels online, though streaming services have intensified competition. The spread of channels across multiple platforms has offset a drop in ad spend on TV in the UK, which has weighed on the industry's revenue. With the proliferation of streaming services like Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon Prime Video, traditional broadcasters are feeling the heat. However, live TV and bundling TV with other services, like broadband, have supported subscription revenue. Revenue has fallen at a compound annual rate of 9% over the five years through 2024-25 to £10.6 billion. This is because the industry relies on linear advertising revenue and broadcast TV viewership, which have both taken a nosedive. Though major sports events have boosted the number of TV advertising slots, revenue is set to drop by 3.6% in 2024-25. More consumers are turning to streaming platforms for news and entertainment instead of traditional TV broadcasts. Even older viewers, once the bastion of traditional TV, are shifting towards streaming services, signalling an urgent need for broadcasters to innovate or risk fading into obscurity. Intense competition from streaming platforms has weighed on ad spending and dented profit over the five years through 2024-25. Over the five years through 2029-30, revenue is forecast to dip at a compound annual rate of 0.8% to £10.2 billion. Revenue growth from subscription services and a jump in the TV Licence fee will boost sales for now. However, with the planned abolition of the fee in 2027, public-funded broadcasters like the BBC will need to find alternative funding sources, introducing uncertainty into their future outlook. Second-screen engagement and internet-connected smart TVs will alter viewing experiences in the coming years, with advanced TV programmes and broadcasting technologies likely to emerge following the trend. However, as SVoD services like Netflix incorporate more advertisements into their platforms, traditional TV broadcasters could lose advertising revenue. Netflix subscriptions for its ad-supported tier have trended upwards and this trend could encourage companies and advertising agencies to move their advertising budget from traditional TV broadcasters to SVoD platforms.

The number of households in the United Kingdom with an Amazon Prime Video subscription increased to **** million in the first quarter of 2025. However, the service faces tough competition from the subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) giant Netflix, who reported **** million subscribers in the UK. Who has more movies and TV shows, Netflix or Amazon? Although Netflix is outperforming Amazon Prime Video in terms of household subscriptions, the latter does have a greater number of titles available. Amazon Prime Video had a total of ****** titles available in the UK as of late-2024, whereas Netflix had *****. The majority of Amazon Prime Video titles are movies in the UK. Amazon’s content spend Amazon Prime Video is an SVOD service owned and run by the online retailer Amazon. In 2023, Amazon’s video and music content budget amounted to an estimated **** billion U.S. dollars, an increase of over ** billion U.S. dollars compared with five years earlier.

OTT video markets in Latin America are relatively diverse not only along demographic and socio-economic lines, but also in terms of adoption of telecom and video services. Countries with high adoption rates of pay-TV, fixed broadband and mobile broadband see the most robust and innovative OTT ecosystems. Netflix’s arrival to Latin America, in 2011, triggered the launch of a number of SVoD initiatives, both at the regional and country level, mostly from established telecom and pay-TV operators looking to defend their position in the pay-TV market, such as América Móvil (Claro Video) and Telefónica (On Video/Movistar Play). Because of the strong influence that Netflix has had in the region, most paid OTT services in the region currently provided on a SVoD basis, although a significant number of companies are also relying on a combination of SVoD, TVoD and AVoD as well as paid linear and free linear content to round out their service offerings. Read More

Netflix's global subscriber base has reached an impressive milestone, surpassing *** million paid subscribers worldwide in the fourth quarter of 2024. This marks a significant increase of nearly ** million subscribers compared to the previous quarter, solidifying Netflix's position as a dominant force in the streaming industry. Adapting to customer losses Netflix's growth has not always been consistent. During the first half of 2022, the streaming giant lost over *** million customers. In response to these losses, Netflix introduced an ad-supported tier in November of that same year. This strategic move has paid off, with the lower-cost plan attracting ** million monthly active users globally by November 2024, demonstrating Netflix's ability to adapt to changing market conditions and consumer preferences. Global expansion Netflix continues to focus on international markets, with a forecast suggesting that the Asia Pacific region is expected to see the most substantial growth in the upcoming years, potentially reaching around **** million subscribers by 2029. To correspond to the needs of the non-American target group, the company has heavily invested in international content in recent years, with Korean, Spanish, and Japanese being the most watched non-English content languages on the platform.

Disney+ will be arriving in the United Kingdom on March 31, 2020. People are already considering subscribing to the new service. A survey from the last quarter of 2019 revealed the streaming services people will unsubscribe from, in order to get Disney+ instead. Their main competitor, Netflix, looks most likely to lose out with almost a third of people prepared to unsubscribe from the video on-demand giant when Disney+ arrives.

In 2022, the top show on Netflix was Stranger Things, followed by Manifest and Inventing Anna.

Stranger Things Since the release of its first season in 2016, Stranger Things has found itself in the top charts all over the world including Canada, Peru, Chile, and France. The ever-growing budgets of streaming platforms has seen production costs balloon over recent years, and as of May 2022, Stranger Things was Netflix’s most expensive program to produce per episode. Stranger Things 4, which premiered in the summer of 2022, was the platforms most popular English-language program of all time as of January 2023. With over a billion hours watched, it’s no wonder it’s the place to be seen for brands advertising through product placement – with some brands product placement amounting to nearly two million U.S. dollars.

Netflix While Netflix began as a DVD-by-mail service, it is now one of the most popular streaming platforms worldwide. In 2021, the company boasted revenues reaching nearly 30 billion dollars. However, Netflix has faced fierce competition from other platforms such as Amazon Prime Video, Hulu U.S., and Disney+. It saw a decrease in the quarterly number of subscribers for the first time in 2022. Despite this, the consumption of shows on Netflix remains a shared experience for many households worldwide. In 2022, it was estimated that Netflix was present in 65 percent of homes in Australia, and 57 percent in the UK.