Amazon Prime and Disney+ close gap on Netflix in Italy

Italy’s Communications Authority Agcom has published a report which shows the state of play in Italian media and telecoms as of September 30, 2022. Among its key findings is that the Italian SVOD sector shrank by 2% in September 2022, compared to the same month in 2021 (down 287,000 to 15.3m). However, the picture across the first nine months of 2022 was more positive – with leading platforms all recording growth.

According to Agcom: “On average, for the first nine months of the year, Netflix recorded 8.9m unique users (+4.2% year on year) followed by Amazon Prime Video with 6.4m visitors (+11.5%). Disney+, with an average of 3.4m Internet users achieved the most intense growth (+41.7%). DAZN, which reaches 2.4m average unique users, shows a growth of 1.7% compared to average users in the first nine months of 2021.”

Drilling down, there were divergences in performance between the two market leaders (though this analyses the period before Netflix launched some of its biggest franchise of 2022 – such as Wednesday and Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery). Agcom said: “The analysis of the overall browsing time spent by surfers on the various platforms in the first nine months of 2022, allows us to ascertain a decrease of 11.6% in relation to Netflix (which from 330 million hours in 2021 goes to 291 million hours). Time spent on Amazon Prime, on the other hand, grew by 17.7% (from 44 million hours in the first nine months of 2021 to 52 million hours in the same period of 2022).”

Agcom also provided an update on the traditional linear TV market. Here, average viewing in September 2022 (7.91 million) decreased by 0.58 million (-3.0%) compared to the corresponding month of 2021. In the first nine months of the year, pubcaster Rai led the rankings with 3.16 million viewers (38.0% share) followed by commercial rival Mediaset with 3.07 million (37.0%). However the gap between the two has been closing, with Rai’s channels shedding audience more quickly that Mediaset’s.