The number of subscribers to Netflix in the UK will overtake the number of homes who are signed up to Sky’s satellite TV service by the end of the year, in a milestone moment for Britain’s growing love affair with streaming services.

By the end of 2018, Netflix UK is forecast to hit 9.78 million subscribers hungry for fare from The Crown to Stranger Things, according to the consultancy Ampere Analysis. That will put it ahead of Sky, which has dominated the market as the biggest pay-TV service in the UK for almost three decades.

Sky UK’s satellite subscriber base has been slowly shrinking for the past few years and is forecast to dip to 9.64m households by the close of the year. It is estimated it will lose 55,000 satellite households this year.

Netflix, which launched in the UK almost seven years ago, is on track to break the 10-million subscriber mark in the UK in the first quarter of 2019. It took Sky two decades to sign up 10m households, reaching the mark set by its former chief executive James Murdoch in November 2010.

Netflix has, however, benefited from being a product of the modern internet era. A combination of the logistics of installing satellite dishes across the country – and the much higher price of subscribing to traditional pay-TV – made Sky’s job of building the UK’s biggest pay-TV platform a much harder task. The vast majority of Netflix customers pay £7.99 a month, meaning it benefits from being an internet-delivered service.

“It does indicate the growing power of subscription video-on-demand services that Netflix has managed to achieve greater household reach in the UK than one of the most successful satellite TV companies in the world,” said Richard Broughton, an analyst at Ampere Analysis. “Of course, although Netflix’s subscriber numbers look large, the other factor that needs to be taken into account is revenue generation. Netflix makes just £7.99 a subscriber; Sky makes on average almost £50 per subscriber per month.”

Sky has not been standing still as the digital streaming revolution has swept the UK. The company launched its Now TV streaming service at the end of 2012 – the same year Netflix entered the UK – and by the end of 2018 it is estimated it will have about 1.5 million subscribers.

Now TV’s model differs from Sky’s traditional pay-TV business significantly by allowing consumers to buy day-long, weekly or monthly “passes” for content such as sport, entertainment and films without the need for a full subscription. It will take another year or two for Netflix to overtake Sky UK’s combined satellite TV and Now TV customer base, which will top 11 million at the end of this year. Now TV is the third most-popular subscription video-on-demand service in the UK after Netflix and Amazon’s Prime Video.

In July, the media regulator, Ofcom, said Britain’s growing appetite for services such as Netflix and Prime Video had resulted in the number of subscribers to streaming services overtaking those signed up to pay-TV providers such as Sky, BT and Virgin Media for the first time in the first quarter this year.

The total number of UK subscribers to the three most popular online streaming services in the UK – Netflix, Prime Video and Sky’s Now TV – hit 15.4 million at the end of the first quarter this year. At the same time, the number of subscribers to pay-TV packages reached 15.1 million.

The milestone marks a major competitive shift in the TV industry. The rise of the global internet firms and changing viewing habits, especially among younger viewers, is putting increasing pressure on the UK’s traditional pay-TV and free-to-air broadcasters, including BBC, ITV and Channel 4.

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In January last year, Sky made its full TV service available via broadband without the need for a satellite dish for the first time, opening up a market of potentially 2m homes to target who cannot, or will not, have a dish.

Coinciding with the arrival of the streaming era and the launch of Now TV, and realising that the rate of new satellite TV subscribers was dwindling fast, Sky stopped separately reporting the number of new traditional TV sign-ups in December 2012. At that point, Sky’s last officially reported satellite TV subscriber number was 10.33 million.

For about two more years, the company reported a combined number – traditional TV sign ups and Now TV numbers – but stopped doing this in September 2014 when the total subscriber base stood at 10.73 million. At the time, analysts believed that in the first quarter of 2014 Sky’s traditional TV subscriber numbers had fallen for the first time in 15 years.