Sky says Roy Morgan's Neon number is too low, reveals On Demand usage

Roy Morgan takes a stab at estimating the number of New Zealanders using the major streaming video-on-demand (SVOD) services in its latest State of the Nation: New Zealand report.

The market research company says:

Although Spark’s Lightbox launched in mid-2014, the arrival of US juggernaut Netflix a year ago drove a rapid expansion of SVOD: by the final quarter of 2015, 904,000 Kiwis (24%) had access to at least one of these services in their home. Looking at the number of homes with service rather than number of people in those homes, Netflix had 264,000 subscribers; Lightbox 128,000 and Sky’s Neon just 22,000 by the end of last year.

Results for various surveys on SVOD usage have been mostly all over the map but a common denominator is that Netflix is far ahead – although it's not always clear how many are tapping into Netflix US, which offers a larger pool of content. And it also hasn't been measured how many are simply pirating content.

As for the veracity of Roy Morgan's numbers, Lightbox owner Spark refused to comment (it has never revealed usage numbers for the service, which is currently free to anyone on a Spark home broadband account). 

Sky refused to comment in detail but communications director Kirsty Way says Morgan's figure is "too low."

Ms Way added that 30% of those who have had the Sky On Demand decoder upgrade have tapped into the new ability to stream on-demand content via broadband (Roy Morgan did not measure the use of Sky On Demand, or Sky's new Fanpass platform for sports channels on demand). She would not say how many Sky subscribers have now been upgraded to On Demand.

Sky plans to boost Neon over the next few weeks with an upgrade to support high-definition streaming, and the introduction of an Apple TV app. 

On May 6, Sky warned that total subscriber numbers will fall by around a net 30,000 to 830,000 by the end of its financial year (June 30).

The anticipated loss of 45,000 residential accounts will be partially offset by an estimated increase of 25,000 in Neon and Fanpass users.

Follow NBR on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram for the latest news and free on-demand audio from NBR Radio.