Most popular streaming services

For most of us, the days of going home, switching on the TV and flicking around to see what’s on the TV are a thing of the past. In many countries, there’s around a 50-50 chance you have a subscription to a streaming service. Finder ran a survey in 18 countries using Google Survey and found that roughly 56% of respondents said they have access to at least 1 streaming service.

New Zealand is the top streaming nation, with 65.26% of respondents saying they use at least 1 service. Just behind the Kiwis are Brazilians, with 64.58% of respondents saying they use at least 1 service. The Irish round out the top 3 with 63.19% of respondents.

At the other end of the spectrum are Pakistanis, with just 44.64% of respondents saying they use a streaming service. Other nations with fairly low numbers of streamers are France (45.21%) and Greece (46.81%).

Which is the most popular streaming service?

It’s difficult to get a true apples-to-apples comparison, with service availability not being the same between nations. So we chose to specifically look at 3 widely available services: Netflix, Disney Plus and Amazon Prime.

Unsurprisingly, Netflix is by far the most popular streaming service across the board. Roughly 42% of those surveyed say they currently have access to a subscription to Netflix, with the Irish topping the list at 56.89% of respondents. Next up are the Kiwis, with 53.78% of respondents, followed by Brazilians at 52.69%.

• Data table

Those least likely to use Netflix are Indians, with just 26.26% of respondents saying they use the streaming service, closely followed by Pakistanis at 26.60%. Closing out the bottom 3 are Germans, with 32.14% of respondents.

Coming in as the second most common streaming service is the newest entrant out of the 3 streaming services, Disney Plus, with 13.94% of respondents saying they use the service. (It’s worth noting that it also has the smallest reach and is only available in 11 of the listed countries). Irish people lead the way, with 19.88% of respondents saying they use the service, followed closely by New Zealanders (18.73%) and Americans (18.11%).

German survey respondents were the least likely to say they use Disney Plus (8.82%), followed by Spaniards (8.91%) and Italians (9.43%).

Amazon Prime Video comes in third with an average of 13.13% of respondents saying they use Amazon Prime Video. It’s the most popular with survey participants in the US (32.80%). Prime Video is also fairly popular in Canada (25.00%) and Spain (24.05%).

The survey found that Greeks were least likely to use Amazon Prime Video, with only 1.01% saying they do. Other countries with low uptake on Prime Video include Hungary (1.77%) and the Philippines (2.72%).

Women are bigger streamers than men

Women have a slight edge over men, with an average of 57.16% of women respondents saying they use at least 1 streaming service compared to 55.58% of men who took the survey.

The survey shows that the top streaming women are the Irish (69.21%), Brazilians (65.98%) and Kiwis (65.31%). For the men, it’s the Kiwis leading the way (65.08%), followed by Brazilians (64.02%) and Canadians (61.92%).

Women least likely to use a streaming service are Pakistanis (40.47%), Greek (45.05%) and French (47.96%). It’s the French (43.92%) for men, followed by Pakistanis (46.09%) and Greeks (48.25%).

As far as which service is most popular among the sexes, popularity for women falls in the same order with Netflix being the most popular, followed by Disney Plus and Amazon Prime. As for the men, Amazon Prime just beats out Disney Plus.

Both Netflix and Disney Plus are most popular with women in Ireland, with 62.94% of women respondents in Ireland using Netflix and 23.43% using Disney Plus. As for Amazon Prime, it’s most popular with American women at 39.02%.

Netflix (54.47%) and Disney Plus (17.89%) are the most popular with men responding to the survey in Ireland. It’s Amazon Prime with men taking the survey in America (29.76%).

Netflix is the least popular with women taking the survey in India (26.69%). Prime saw its lowest share with Greek women (0.35%) and women in Spain (8.52%) having the least interest in Disney Plus. Once again, the men follow suit, with only 26.33% of men taking the survey in India using Netflix subscriptions. 1.97% of Greek men said they use Amazon Prime Video and 8.33% of French men said Disney Plus.

A closer look into Canada

Canada ranks 5th out of 18 for the percentage of respondents who said they use at least 1 streaming service.

As far as which service is most popular, Netflix leads the way, with 52.05% of respondents saying they use the streaming giant. Next up for people from Canada is Amazon Prime Video, with 24.98% saying they stream using Prime. Rounding out the top 3 streaming services in Canada is Disney Plus, with 17% having an active subscription.

More women than men have a streaming service

Locally, more women than men answering the survey said they use a streaming service with 63.93% of women compared to 62% of men.

The most common response for both sexes is Netflix, with 56.72% of women and 53.20% of men saying they subscribe to the platform. Other popular options include Amazon Prime Video, with 30.10% of women and 24.20% of men saying they have access to a subscription and Disney Plus with 16.42% of women and 16.60% of men.

Netflix tops the list across each age group

Netflix was the most popular streaming platform across each age group with 64.38% of people aged 18–24, 50.98% of 25–34-year-olds, 61.02% aged 35–44, 60.29% of 45–54-year-olds, 51.40% of 55–64-year-olds and 40.44% of those over 65 saying they use the platform.

Canada has the best access to the top 100 most in-demand series

With 51 of Parrot Analytics’ top 100 most in-demandmore info button series being available on their country’s Netflix, Canada ranks 1st out of 18 countries.

However, with a standard subscription costing US$12.23, Canada ranks 10th in terms of cost, with a monthly cost per top 100 most in-demand series of $0.24.

Combining these 2 factors gives Canada an overall rank of 4th in terms of cost and comprehensiveness for the country's Netflix.

Top 100 shows

Curious which were the most in-demand TV shows? Here's the list:

• Methodology

  Finder conducted Google Surveys of 28,547 adults across 18 nations. Due to the varying Google infrastructure in each territory, not all surveys were nationally representative. Where a nationally representative sample was unavailable, a natural fall/convenience sample was used. For these, Google didn't use stratified sampling but did apply weights to the survey results if the demographics of the survey respondents didn't vary too far from demographics data. The details of Google's survey methodology can be found here. The list of the countries studied, sample sizes and survey types are presented below:

  • Brazil: Nationally representative sample of 1,968
  • Canada: Nationally representative sample of 1,192
  • Germany: Nationally representative sample of 1,985
  • Denmark: A convenience sample of 1,184
  • Spain: Nationally representative sample of 1,493
  • France: Nationally representative sample of 1,502
  • Greece: A convenience sample of 1,192
  • Hungary: A convenience sample of 1,186
  • Ireland: A convenience sample of 1,197
  • India: A convenience sample of 2,430
  • Italy: A convenience sample of 1,485
  • Mexico: Nationally representative sample of 1,987
  • Malaysia: A convenience sample of 1,452
  • New Zealand: A convenience sample of 993
  • Philippines: A convenience sample of 1,949
  • Pakistan: A convenience sample of 1,895
  • United States: Nationally representative sample of 1,988
  • South Africa: A convenience sample of 1,469

  Finder was given access to Parrot Analytics top 100 TV series popularity data, which is the total audience demand being expressed for a title within a market. Audience demand reflects the desire, engagement and viewership, weighted by importance; so a stream/download is a higher expression of demand than a "like"/comment. In this dataset, we are comparing the demand that exists for each series in this market against the average TV show. A difference of 1x represents the market average and 10x means a series is 10 times more in demand than the average TV show in this market. The data set was pulled in May and measured interest in these series between April 1 and 24, 2021.

  Once we had this data, we set about checking both the prices for Netflix and whether the titles appeared on Netflix in those countries. We were able to verify the majority of libraries in most of these countries with people on the ground but did have to validate some countries using Just Watch.

  A couple of important things to note:

  1. Netflix libraries are constantly updating, so the availability of a series on Netflix may have changed since this article was researched and written.
  2. Like Netflix libraries, currency valuations also change and the prices quoted in USD were gathered using Google Finance currency conversion on June 16, 2021.

Image: Getty