Streaming, Netflix leads the market in Italy among new players and offers with commercials

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The market leader is Netflix. And today it is difficult for the picture to be subverted given that the second player in the ranking (in this case Amazon Prime Video) is two percentage points away from the third, Disney+, which is even 12 points away. The video on demand market has its winner in the Los Gatos giant. The photograph was taken by JustWatch, a search engine for streaming products which provided its estimates on the most used streaming services in Italy in the first quarter of the year.

Where does this data come from? We start from the requests of users who control JustWatch to search for specific content. From the platform the answers consist of indications on the streaming services that host the specific audiovisual content sought. On the other hand, however, using this data JustWatch is able to measure the interest of users when they add films or TV shows to their list, click on a streaming service or filter multiple streaming services and select the relevant streaming. Various weighted internal ranking factors complete the mechanism.

The streamers’ podium

This is the methodology that leads to the final result that sees Netflix in the lead among the most used streaming services in Italy: 30% of users. Following, as mentioned, are Amazon Prime Video (28%) and Disney+ completing the podium (18%). The service is far behind in fourth position – Sky’s Now, at 7% – followed by Paramount + (5%); Infinity by Mediaset and Timvision (4%) and the other services (5%) close the cake. Between January and March only Netflix, Prime Video and Timvision increased their market share by one percentage point. On the contrary, one percentage point is what Now left on the ground at the same time.

Concentration on the market

This is the picture in a streaming market which, as the data clearly expresses, is very concentrated. As reported in the study “SVOD Usage in the European Union” by the European Audiovisual Observatory, in a period between September 2022 and September 2023 three platforms captured 85% of the viewing time of SVOD video on demand services ( those with subscription): Netflix with 53.4% ​​of total viewing time, Amazon Prime Video with 19.4% and Disney+ with 12.1 percent.

Between consolidation and advertising

At this point it will be necessary to understand what will happen on the market dealing with two trends: consolidation to cope with the need to stay on a market in which spending on content has required and requires increasingly broader shoulders and the increase in the presence of services at lower cost, but with advertising.