The eight-episode Alien: Earth has just begun on Disney+. Kiwi actor Erana James is second from right. Photo / FX
More New Zealanders are watching subscription-based streaming now than at the height of pandemic lockdowns, according to new Roy Morgan research.
Some 6000 Kiwis were surveyed between July 2024 and June 2025, with the results compared to July 2020 to June 2021.
Netflix – which already had heavy saturation by 2020 – achieved just 4% growth over the surveyed period to 2.3 million viewers, compared with overall growth of 7% to 3.1 million.
On the surface, Sky TV looks like the wooden-spooner, with subscription-based streaming viewership that fell 0.6% to 1.28 million.
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.
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 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.