Subscription streaming services: Survey reveals who's up, who's down in viewership
It's also notable that Roy Morgan counts the number of viewers to a subscription-based video service, while Sky TV reports the number of paying customers, so the Lightbox bulge was likely north of 300,000.
The lay of the land is now also different from 2020, when Netflix and its peers were in a sod-the-losses land grab. Today, the focus is on profit, with crackdowns on password sharing and price rises across all services.
Sky has increased the price of Sky Sport Now subscriptions since 2020, citing increased content costs, amid a landscape that has altered with the disappearance of Spark Sport.
On those criteria, Sky (which reports next Friday) is in better shape. Back in 2020 (when Spark Sport was still a contender), it charged $24.99 per month. Today, it bills $54.99 per month.
Sky did not break out numbers for its entertainment stream, Neon, or Sky Sport Now in FY2021. For its FY2025 half-year result, it said Sky Sport Now subscribers stood at 173,000 – a gain over the second half of FY2024 (160,000) but down from the 209,000 high it hit during the last Men's Rugby World Cup.
Similarly, Neon was up 2.2% to 264,000 subscribers in the first half of FY2025 versus the second half of FY2024 but behind the 277,000 reported in the first half of FY2024.
The biggest gains
The biggest gains were by what is still the cheapest service, despite increasing its monthly price from $7.99 to $10.99 over the period: Amazon's Prime Video, up 166% or 522,000 viewers to 835,000.
Prime was centred on the disappointingly flat Top Gear spin-off, The Grand Tour, when it first launched in New Zealand. However, it has been bulked out by Amazon's purchase of giant Hollywood studio MGM (home of James Bond and other franchises) and 'dad TV' hits like Reacher and Clarkson's Farm.
Recent developments have included Amazon announcing that ads will be introduced to Prime in New Zealand (a global trend that Disney+ and Netflix have yet to introduce here) and Prime expanding into a portal where you can also buy subscriptions and view content from other services, such as Apple TV+.
The 'other' category, which includes Apple TV+, YouTube Premium, Google Play, Hayu, Tubi, Acorn TV, Crunchyroll, DAZN and NBA League Pass, among others, showed the second-highest growth, at 141%.
Third in growth was Disney+, which jumped 48% to 1.06 million viewers – another to considerably bulk up content between the two survey periods, notably under its Star brand, which includes content from Disney acquisitions like 20th Century Fox and Hulu. Content has also just been added from another Disney property, ESPN (meaning Sky TV has lost its exclusivity).
Original content has also been ramped up, including the eight-episode Alien: Earth, the first series based on the popular Alien movie franchise (with Ridley Scott as an executive producer and Kiwi actor Erana James in the cast).
The Roy Morgan Single Source survey's focus on subscription services means it does not include the free TVNZ+ or ThreeNow (recently taken over by Sky).
In its FY2025 first-half report, TVNZ – citing a Nielsen survey – said: 'TVNZ+ has cemented its position as the biggest local streaming platform, with over 1.65 million New Zealanders now using the service every week.'
Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald's business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Otago Daily Times
2 days ago
- Otago Daily Times
Eliminating jobs and living on borrowed time
As ever, we are living on borrowed time. There's the familiar old threat of global nuclear war and the growing risk of global climate catastrophe, plus not-quite-world-ending potential disasters like global pandemics and untoward astronomical events (asteroid strikes, solar flares, etc.) Lots to worry about already, if you're that way inclined. So, it's understandable that the new kid on the block, artificial intelligence, has been having some trouble making its presence felt. Yet the so-called 'godfather of Artificial Intelligence', scientist Geoffrey Hinton, who last year was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work on AI, sees a 10% to 20% chance that AI will wipe out humanity in the next three decades. We will come back to that, but let's park it for the moment because the near-term risk of an AI crash is more urgent and easier to quantify. This is a financial crash of the sort that usually accompanies an exciting new technology, not an existential crisis, but it is definitely on its way. When railways were the hot new technology in the United States in the 1850s, for example, there were five different companies building railways between New York and Chicago. They all got built in the end, but most were no longer in the hands of the original investors and a lot of people lost their shirts. We are probably in the final phase of the AI investment frenzy right now. We're a generation on from the bubble of the early 2000s, so most people have forgotten about that one and are ready to throw their money at the next. There are reportedly now more than 200 AI "unicorns" — start-ups "valued" at $1 billion or more — so the end is nigh. The bitter fact that drives even the industry leaders into this folly is the knowledge that after the great shake-out not all of them will still be standing. For the moment, therefore, it makes sense for them to invest madly in the servers, data-centres, semiconductor chips and brain-power that will define the last companies standing. The key measure of investment is capex — capital expenditure — and it's going up like a rocket even from month to month. Microsoft is forecasting about $100b in capex for AI in the next fiscal year, Amazon will spend the same, Alphabet (Google) plans $85b, and Meta predicts between $66 and $72b. Like $100m sign-on fees for senior AI researchers who are being poached from one big tech firm by another, these are symptoms of a bubble about to burst and lots of people will lose their shirts, but it's just part of the cycle. AI will still be there afterwards, and many uses will be found for it. Unfortunately, most of them will destroy jobs. The tech giants themselves are eliminating jobs even as they grow their investments. Last year 549 US tech companies shed 150,000 workers, and this year they are disappearing even faster. If that phenomenon spreads across the whole economy — and why wouldn't it? — we can get to the apocalypse without any need for help from Skynet and the Terminator. People talk loosely about "Artificial General Intelligence" (AGI) as the Holy Grail, because it would be as nimble and versatile as human intelligence, just smarter — but as tech analyst Benedict Evans says, "We don't really have a theoretical model of why [current AI models] work so well, and what would have to happen for them to get to AGI. "It's like saying 'we're building the Apollo programme but we don't actually know how gravity works or how far away the Moon is, or how a rocket works, but if we keep on making the rocket bigger maybe we'll get there'." So the whole scenario of a super-intelligent computer becoming self-aware and taking over the planet remains far-fetched. Nevertheless, old-fashioned 2022-style generative AI will continue to improve, even if Large Language Models are really just machines that produce human-like text by estimating the likelihood that a particular word will appear next, given the text that has come before. Aaron Rosenberg, former head of strategy at Google's AI unit Deep Mind, reckons that no miraculous leaps of innovation are needed. "If you define AGI more narrowly as at least 80th-percentile human-level performance [better than four out of five people] in 80% of economically relevant digital tasks, then I think that's within reach in the next five years." That would enable us to eliminate at least half of the indoor jobs by 2030, but if the change comes that fast it will empower extremists of all sorts and create pre-revolutionary situations almost everywhere. That's a bit more complicated than the Skynet scenario for global nuclear war, but it's also a lot more plausible. Slow down. — Gwynne Dyer is an independent London journalist.
NZ Herald
3 days ago
- NZ Herald
AI boom in Australia: Amazon investment sparks debate on artificial intelligence and housing shortage
But what do we actually get for the money? Just data centres. If I was making a list of things Australia should be doing with concrete and air-conditioning, it would not include making data centres. What we need desperately, what we are horribly short of, is homes. House prices are zooming up, and not just from speculation. We've had huge inflation in the cost of building. Building a house from scratch costs around A$500,000, depending on its size and location. Maybe as much as a million bucks. And the inflation data tell us that price is up 39% compared with 2020. Even renovation costs a bomb. Chucking a renovation on a small old home is now an A$500,000+ activity. Jeff Bezos' Amazon wants to build data centres in Australia. Photo / Getty Images Why is building houses expensive? For a lot of reasons. One is the tradie shortage. Prices for getting the plumbing and wiring and framework of a house all put in are up sharply. Concrete slabs cost a fortune now. Australia needs new homes. Photo / Getty Images When it comes to these data centres, Amazon is supplying the capital, the money, which is nice. But money is not something Australia is super short of. We have trillions in the national superannuation fund that's just plonked in the sharemarket. (In fact, we have more super funds than the whole sharemarket is worth, so we now have to invest in other countries' sharemarkets too.) What we are short of is skilled people. Unemployment is at a historically low 4.3% right now. Unemployment among trades workers (people whose last job was in the trades) is about as low as it has ever been. You build a data centre – it doesn't cause the plumber tree to magically make more plumbers. The result is some fella driving his Ford Ranger to the data centre site instead of a site where they are making a new suburb. He spends the day plumbing server air-conditioning systems instead of dunnies. We get fewer workers in the home-building industry and fewer new homes. Large language models In a perfect world, we would be trying to allocate all our spare workers to making homes – and reallocate the workers who aren't spare to that task too. But instead we will be allocating them to meet the needs of large language models. Artificial intelligence (AI) has lots of different tricks but the most popular ones are language models, where you ask it a question and it tells you an answer, like GPT-5, the newest update that came out this week. Large language models are trained on published materials (including my articles on the internet, which I think is quite cool, and my book, which they pirated and I'm cross about). So far, large language models are kind of stupid, giving lots of wrong answers to easy questions, making things up, etc. But anyone making definitive judgments that AI is therefore pointless is engaging in wishful thinking. The pace of change is breakneck. Just because AIs hallucinated and couldn't draw fingers six months ago does not mean they still suck now. The future is yet to be seen. AI could turn out to be useful. (In fact, Waymo uses AI to drive its driverless cars and the early data show they crash way less than people.) But AI is a gamble and the payoff for the gamble will go to Amazon. Whereas making some more homes is a pretty sure bet that would actually help Australians, especially the increasingly large cohort who do not own a home. Less than 50% of 30-34 year olds owned a home at the last Census, down from 68% 40 years earlier. The AI bulge The following chart shows capital expenditure by the IT industry in Australia. It gives us a little glimpse of the foothills of this AI investment boom, which is set to grow even more. Private new capital expenditure and expected expenditure in March 2025. We are already spending three times as much as a few years ago. Not to mention more than in the year-2000 dotcom bubble. This is the other big concern about AI; if the huge investment doesn't pay off, there could be a big market crash. As in 2000, firms will have spent a lot of money on an idea that will pay off eventually. But it won't pay off soon enough to prevent a crisis of confidence, a market downturn, a crash in capital expenditure and an economic slowdown. This is another risk we invite on our shores when we welcome Amazon's capital expenditure. There are a lot of people worrying that AI will bring about a terrifying technological singularity, where it uses its own intelligence to make itself ever smarter and then destroys us. I think there's not nearly enough people worrying that AI will just grind us down by distracting us from building the things that will actually make us happier.
NZ Herald
5 days ago
- NZ Herald
Subscription streaming services: Survey reveals who's up, who's down in viewership
However, Sky's streaming numbers for the year to June 30, 2021, were inflated by 154,000 former customers of Lightbox, the streaming service founded by Spark and then offloaded to Sky. Those who joined the telco for a bundled Lightbox subscription had to be accommodated over the next 24 months. It's also notable that Roy Morgan counts the number of viewers to a subscription-based video service, while Sky TV reports the number of paying customers, so the Lightbox bulge was likely north of 300,000. The lay of the land is now also different from 2020, when Netflix and its peers were in a sod-the-losses land grab. Today, the focus is on profit, with crackdowns on password sharing and price rises across all services. Sky has increased the price of Sky Sport Now subscriptions since 2020, citing increased content costs, amid a landscape that has altered with the disappearance of Spark Sport. On those criteria, Sky (which reports next Friday) is in better shape. Back in 2020 (when Spark Sport was still a contender), it charged $24.99 per month. Today, it bills $54.99 per month. Sky did not break out numbers for its entertainment stream, Neon, or Sky Sport Now in FY2021. For its FY2025 half-year result, it said Sky Sport Now subscribers stood at 173,000 – a gain over the second half of FY2024 (160,000) but down from the 209,000 high it hit during the last Men's Rugby World Cup. Similarly, Neon was up 2.2% to 264,000 subscribers in the first half of FY2025 versus the second half of FY2024 but behind the 277,000 reported in the first half of FY2024. The biggest gains The biggest gains were by what is still the cheapest service, despite increasing its monthly price from $7.99 to $10.99 over the period: Amazon's Prime Video, up 166% or 522,000 viewers to 835,000. Prime was centred on the disappointingly flat Top Gear spin-off, The Grand Tour, when it first launched in New Zealand. However, it has been bulked out by Amazon's purchase of giant Hollywood studio MGM (home of James Bond and other franchises) and 'dad TV' hits like Reacher and Clarkson's Farm. Recent developments have included Amazon announcing that ads will be introduced to Prime in New Zealand (a global trend that Disney+ and Netflix have yet to introduce here) and Prime expanding into a portal where you can also buy subscriptions and view content from other services, such as Apple TV+. The 'other' category, which includes Apple TV+, YouTube Premium, Google Play, Hayu, Tubi, Acorn TV, Crunchyroll, DAZN and NBA League Pass, among others, showed the second-highest growth, at 141%. Third in growth was Disney+, which jumped 48% to 1.06 million viewers – another to considerably bulk up content between the two survey periods, notably under its Star brand, which includes content from Disney acquisitions like 20th Century Fox and Hulu. Content has also just been added from another Disney property, ESPN (meaning Sky TV has lost its exclusivity). Original content has also been ramped up, including the eight-episode Alien: Earth, the first series based on the popular Alien movie franchise (with Ridley Scott as an executive producer and Kiwi actor Erana James in the cast). The Roy Morgan Single Source survey's focus on subscription services means it does not include the free TVNZ+ or ThreeNow (recently taken over by Sky). In its FY2025 first-half report, TVNZ – citing a Nielsen survey – said: 'TVNZ+ has cemented its position as the biggest local streaming platform, with over 1.65 million New Zealanders now using the service every week.' Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald's business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.
