How Many People Use Netflix In Australia?

Netflix is rumoured to enter Australia early next year (that was later essentially confirmed), but that doesn’t stop a few enterprising Australians from accessing it now. Actually, it’s more than a few.

This post originally appeared on the Pocketbook blog

The article we linked to said up to 200,000 Australians signed up with the service. There are also many anecdotes about the popularity of Netflix in Australia in the forums and social media. So we decided to look deeper into the subject*.

Let’s start with the basics: stat 1 — market share.

Our study found Netflix to be the second most popular paid-content media company in Australia, despite the fact that they are not officially available here and that they are actively geo-blocking Australians. Here’s a breakdown of the market (click on the image to get a bigger picture):

That’s right. Netflix owns 27% of the Australians currently using media subscription or rental services. And as you can see, they’ve tripled in size from just 9.88% in January 2013.

But the growth didn’t come at the expense of the local dominant player: Foxtel. The growth came from the old-world end of the market: rentals and to a lesser extent, local clone — Quickflix.

I should note here that the graph is based on the number of users (popularity) as opposed to dollars spent (revenue). And that means it doesn’t take into account metrics such as: