Netflix and Amazon made £1.1B in revenue from ~17.7M UK subscribers in 2018, while streaming services of UK's four main commercial broadcasters made ~£530M
Mark Sweney / The Guardian :
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2018 revenue split lands just months after Ofcom reported that UK subscribers to Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Sky's Now TV had overtaken traditional pay-TV for the first time. The Guardian's numbers add the money dimension to that milestone: the two US platforms were already taking roughly twice as much from UK viewers as the streaming arms of the four main commercial broadcasters combined.
The gap only widened from there. Ofcom's next quarterly tally showed Netflix posting the largest subscription gains, Ampere counted 32.4M combined subscribers across the top three services during 2020, and Netflix's own UK accounts later showed revenue up 43% to £172M with profits up 50% — confirming the 2018 baseline as an early snapshot of a widening lead.
First-order effects
- The four main commercial broadcasters enter the streaming race with a UK revenue base (~£530M) roughly half of Netflix and Amazon's combined £1.1B, constraining what they can spend on original programming against rivals whose UK income alone outstrips theirs.
- Netflix and Amazon's per-subscriber economics in the UK prove strong enough to fund local expansion organically — the 2020 accounts show both revenue and pre-tax profit growing faster than the subscriber base.
Second-order effects
- New US entrants pile into the same household budget: Ampere's 2020 count puts Disney+ alongside Netflix and Prime Video in a top three holding 32.4M UK subscriptions, meaning broadcasters now compete against a growing roster of globally funded platforms rather than two.
- Sky's Now TV, which Ofcom grouped with Netflix and Prime back when streaming first passed pay-TV, faces the squeeze from both sides — a broadcaster-owned service priced into a market where the biggest players' scale keeps compounding.
Third-order effects
- The displacement becomes structural: by Ofcom's 2021 study, Netflix's UK customer base alone exceeded the total of all UK pay-TV subscriptions, with national streaming subscriptions up from 20M in 2019 to 31M — the 2018 revenue gap was the leading edge of a permanent shift in how UK households pay for television.
- Content spending escalates as the battleground: EAO data show global streamers pouring €4.9B into European originals in 2022, led by Netflix's €2.2B, forcing UK broadcasters to decide whether to match spend they cannot easily fund, consolidate, or cede premium original production to the platforms.
The trend: UK television revenue and viewing are migrating from broadcaster-owned and pay-TV services to globally scaled US streamers, with each year's subscriber and content-spend data widening the gap this 2018 snapshot first quantified.