Yesterday US video streaming and DVD rental site Netflix announced that it was going to have a second crack at conquering the UK market. The company has decided to focus solely on online video streaming this time around, in a move which will see it go head-to-head with LoveFilm.
Our online video report was also released yesterday, which shows the UK is increasing its consumption of video content online. 785 million visits a month go to online video websites, a year-on-year increase of 36% since September 2010. With more people watching video content online (over 240 million hours a month in the UK) is there a place for Netflix to make its mark against LoveFilm and other streaming sites?
Currently Netflix isn’t on the same radar as LoveFilm, with LoveFilm receiving 600 times more traffic on a monthly basis than Netflix in the UK.
However, Netflix is huge in the US, and was the 28th most visited website in the States in September 2011, receiving more visits than ESPN, Walmart and MapQuest. 1 in every 400 visits online went to Netflix in the US in September 2011. To put that into context, 1 in every 2500 visits online went to LoveFilm in the UK. If Netflix can capture the imagination of the online population here in the UK as it has in the US, then certainly there is room for another video streaming site in our market. One of the findings from the video report is that a high proportion of consumers watch video content on multiple websites each month.
The diagram above shows the cumulative frequency of visits to online video websites from the UK Internet population. 86% of the population visit at least 1 video website a month, but almost half of the population (46%) watch video on at least 3 different video sites a month. 1 in 5 people visit 5 or more different video websites in a month, showing the propensity for consumers to watch video on multiple video sites. With users watching video on such a variety of websites, there is definitely an opportunity for Netflix to capitalise on the growing UK market.
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