EastEnders, Love Island and Married at First Sight help UK’s broadcasters to beat US streaming giants

More UK viewers opted for the free video-on-demand services offered by British broadcasters last year in the wake of the cost-of-living crisis, beating the US streaming giants.

New data shows the streamed offerings of the homegrown channels, including BBC iPlayer, Channel 4 and ITVX, grew faster than the global streamers during 2024. And the figures, obtained from a source with the official TV industry, reveal that young people in particular were rejecting subscription services like Disney+, Netflix, and Amazon Prime.

The BARB data for 2024 shows that the broadcast streamers ‘ share of viewer minutes grew by 12%, against a 4% decline on 2023 for the streamers, which also include Apple TV, Discovery+ and Paramount+. For viewers aged 16-34, the share of viewing time held by the UK channels, which also include Five, Sky and UKTV, increased by 8% while the subscription streamers ‘ slice was down by 2% year-on-year.

The top four shows appealing to those younger viewers were the BBC’s EastEnders (2.6bn), ITV’s Love Island (1.6bn), Sky’s Premier League coverage (1.6bn) and Channel 4’s Married at First Sight UK (1.5bn). The combined catch-up services offered by traditional broadcasters increased by a staggering 23%, compared to the US streamers’ 6% growth, who saw a 1% decline in the 16-34 age category. Overall, the shows on the channels accounted for 67% of all on-demand viewer time, compared to the streamers’ 33%. Total viewer minutes in the UK were put at 1.2trillion for the BBC, 739billion for ITV, 520billion for Netflix, 361billion for Channel 4 and 166billion for Amazon Prime.

According to some experts, the cost of living crisis, which means households are cutting back on TV subscriptions, especially in the face of widespread price increases, a preference from UK viewers for more British-leaning programming, a perceived move by Netflix into more mainstream programming, and the launch of Freely, which gives viewers another way to stream content from the UK’s public service broadcasters for free, are contributing factors to the streamers’ downturn.

The trend has continued into 2025, with January data showing that the channels’ share of watched viewer minutes increased by 21%, compared to the -1% decline for the major US players, with the 16-34 age group experiencing a 15% decline. The highest average performance of all commercial channels has been recorded on Channel 4, with 14% more viewing time in January than last year. One C4 insider said: “It’s clear that the type of programming offered by the broadcaster-run streaming services resonate deeply with British viewers. Simply put, Merseyside Detectives, Married At First Sight, and To Catch a Copper’s success highlight what public service broadcasters are able to offer: content that accurately portrays and speaks to the national conversation.

In the first instance, it was reported earlier this month that Neflix had outperformed BBC1 for the most popular service in the UK for 12 weeks in the fall of 2024. The success was described as the “unseating of Britain’s most popular channel” with Netflix’s average audience reach standing at 43.2m, compared with BBC1’s 42.3m. At the time the BBC claimed it was “meaningless” to compare the whole of Netflix with a single channel. A BBC spokesman said last night that the BBC portfolio was “almost twice the size of Netflix over the year and bigger than all of the SVODs (US streamers) combined.” The UK’s fastest-growing TV streaming service is BBC iPlayer.

Netflix released the new figures from Los Angeles as part of its global programming slate for 2025. Bela Bejaria, the chief content officer, refuted rival claims that Netflix focused solely on binge-watch appeal and volume rather than “prestige” programming. She claimed that Netflix handled everything, noting that “some people claim that producing quality TV or movies requires more than four titles annually. But we can, and we do.

” With more than 700 million people watching, we can’t just be one thing. We need to be the best version of everything. The only thing we do know is that a large percentage of those who boast about producing prestige TV only have a small following. This year, we’ve got some beautiful, powerful shows that meet any definition of ‘ prestige TV’. “Bela said 2024’s big hits had included One Day, The Gentlemen, Baby Reindeer, Nobody Wants This, Rebel Ridge and Squid Game. The final seasons of Stranger Things and Squid Game will debut on June 27th, along with series two of the supernatural hit Wednesday, in 2025’s programming.

A clip from Victoria Beckham’s documentary, which follows her at work on her fashion and beauty brand, will be broadcast later this year, with her pondering why she doesn’t need to do it and debating when one of her launches looks like it’s going to be a washout due to heavy rain. Also in the works are the crime thriller Black Rabbit, a New York-set crime thriller starring Jude Law and Jason Bateman as brothers, and the gritty teen knife-crime drama Adolescence, a film RIP, a Miami-set crime thriller starring Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.

A hard-hitting documentary about the Grenfell Tower disaster, a film adaptation of Richard Osman’s bestselling novel The Thursday Murder Club, and Steven Knight’s new series House of Guinness about the Guinness family set in 19th-century Dublin and New York, are some of the offerings. Helena Bonham Carter and Martin Freeman appear in an adaptation of Agatha Christie’s The Seven Dials, as well as Kate Hudson and Gillian Anderson, who play the lead in the new comedy Running Point. A broken-hearted woman relocates from the US to London and wonders if Americans and Brits even have the same language as her in-demand comedy drama Too Much, which is based on Linda Dunham.

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Source: Mirror