Irish spending on streaming services drops

More than 600,000 people now use a password for a service they don't pay for

More than a third of Irish adults have cancelled one or more video streaming subscriptions in the last 12 months.

Irish households have cut back on streaming services citing costs, lack of content and the end of introductory offers.

A new survey from Pure Telecom found that the annual spend on video streaming services by consumers in Ireland is €1.1bn, down €200m since last year. This is despite the fact that video streaming has grown in popularity over the last year.

The research shows that while 96% of adults in Ireland are streaming video content, there has been a rise in the proportion of adults who do not pay for a subscription. Additionally, the average number of subscriptions per adult has dropped.

One in five adults in Ireland does not have a paid video streaming subscription, a significant increase from the 6% who said this last year, and the average number of video streaming subscriptions per adult has gone from 2.4 last year to 1.5 this year.

Pure Telecom’s survey also found that 37% of adults have cancelled one or more video streaming subscriptions in the last 12 months. Of these, 45% said they did so because of costs and 28% said the content wasn’t good enough. One in five cancelled in favour of another service and the same proportion said they cancelled because the free or discounted period had elapsed.

“Our expectation for this research was that we would find, yet again, that the streaming spend in Ireland had risen," Paul Connell, CEO of Pure Telecom, said. "Instead, we found that as we approach 100% of the population using streaming services, people are getting more frugal about which services, and how many, they are willing to pay for."

The research also delved into password-sharing, whereby people use the login details of friends or family outside of their household to access streaming services. The survey found that almost 615,000 adults in Ireland are using someone else’s password to stream video content without them, or the account holder, paying for it. This is despite the fact that almost 400,000 of these are availing of streaming services that have a policy of charging extra for password-sharing.

The research was conducted by Censuswide, with 1,006 consumers in the Republic of Ireland.