At the end of 2014, Australians collectively subscribed to about 315,000 streaming video on demand (SVOD) services.

But in the six months since, that total's grown to over two million according to analyst outfit Telsyte.

What's changed? Netflix came to Australia and was chased into the market by local player Stan. Those two companies now hold the first and second ranks among the nation's SVOD players, ahead of Foxtel's Presto and first-mover Quickflix. Together, these four companies account for 90 per cent of accounts.

Telsyte has a couple of interesting observations about the market, one of which is that all those free offers* you see out there are working because punters are converting to paid subscribers. Another is that the average punter subscribes to 1.6 services, largely because no single provider has been able to amass a killer content catalog. That may be why the firm says “At the end of June, almost 40 per cent of Australian households that had SVOD services also had traditional Pay TV.”

Or perhaps we're just couch potatoes par excellence.

Telsyte says the ten per cent of services not offered by the big four cover “... sports and special interest niches like AFL, NBA basketball, NRL and UFC matches.”

Sport, it's long been assumed, is the killer app for subscription video, especially on mobile devices. Maybe that notion needs to be revisited. ®

*Last week your correspondent bought a cheap smartphone locked to a carrier for AU$29. It came with three months of free Netflix, on a plan for which I usually pay $11.50 a month. I now have a phone I use around the house on WiFi, but will probably never use on the telco's network. I've no idea what the telco to which the handset is locked is paying Netflix, but someone's losing out here!