Australian Netflix use has tripled in the past 12 months
Australians are increasingly using Netflix, despite the geoblocking, according to financial app Pocketbook. But strangely enough, Foxtel doesn't need to worry...
It's no secret that Australians are big users of Netflix. Thanks to the simplicity of VPNs more and more Aussies are dodging around the geoblock to become paying subscribers of the US-based video on demand service.
Now, courtesy of Australian financial app Pocketbook, we have some figures to put on the local Netflix usage.
Using data from its own user base -- without identifying the individual users of course -- Pocketbook has put together some intriguing statistics. In terms of market share when compared to Foxtel, Netflix has grown from just 9.8 percent in January 2013 to an impressive 27.9 percent in June 2014.
This means that, in Pocketbook's sample, there is more than one Netflix subscriber for every two Foxtel subscribers. Additionally, Australian Netflix users have a longer average subscription length -- 110 days to 80 days for Foxtel subscribers.
Interesting, this growth in Netflix isn't impacting on Foxtel. It's not losing market share to Netflix -- but rental services, both online and offline tradition 'video stores' are.
There are a few caveats about the data, however. Firstly, the sample size, while a solid 21,000+, is obviously drawn only from Pocketbook users. Secondly, by Pocketbook's own admission, it didn't take into account "iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Pandora and Xbox purchases". At the very least, we'd expect iTunes to be a highly significant player in the space.
Pocketbook has also used what's called a cohort analysis to determine subscription length -- we'd recommend reading the original source material extremely carefully to get a sense of how they've arrived at these numbers.
But one final piece of extremely interesting information did come out of the Pocketbook data -- the arrival of Amazon Prime as a (small) player in Australia. Since September 2013 a small proportion of the sample have been subscribing to the Amazon Prime service -- this peaked at one percent in May 2013 and dropped back slightly in June.
Amazon Prime is a yearly subscription fee and its use is likely to be around the Kindle Fire HD and HDX tablets going on sale locally. Could grey market imports of the Amazon Fire Phone boost these figures? We'll be closely watching for any further figures from Pocketbook in the future.