The streaming giant makes official the number of its subscribers in Italy: our country is one of the most important markets for Netflix in Europe
That Netflix is the world leader in streaming, with about 210 million subscribers worldwide (updated to mid-2021), has been known for some time. That it is starting to suffer competition from other platforms, especially Disney+, is instead recent news. What we didn't know yet, at least not officially, was the number of Netflix subscribers in Italy.
This number was made official by Tinni Andreatta, head of Netflix's Italian original productions. But it's a number that doesn't surprise anyone, as it's exactly the same as the estimates published by many analysis companies, such as Comparitech, Statista and eMarketer: Italian Netflix users are 4 million. This is an important number, considering that the estimate of total Netflix users in Europe, the Middle East and Africa is 68.7 million (Statista data, updated to mid-2021). Netflix in Italy, therefore, is now a colossus and, also for this reason, has undertaken a transparency operation that began with the creation of the company Netflix Italia and continues now with the official disclosure of the number of subscribers.
Streaming growing in Italy
The official disclosure of data on Italian Netflix users took place during the presentation of the 3rd Apa Report on Audiovisual Production, a report from which it is clear that the weight of streaming platforms in the national panorama of audiovisual production is constantly growing.
According to the report, in fact, today in Italy 1,3 billion euros are spent to produce audiovisual contents and almost half of it, 600 million as reported by Prima Online, is destined to the production of "seriality", that is fictions and TV series.
The data of the 3rd Apa Report also show that the value of the productions of the Ott (Over-The-Top, the companies that offer contents through Internet) could reach already in 2023 the value of the production of the classic TV operators. In less than two years, therefore, we will spend as much to produce streaming content as we do to produce what we see on TV.
Stream is the future
If we add sports to what we have been talking about so far, focused on dramas, TV series and movies, it is easy to understand why streaming will soon surpass traditional TV. Just think of the fact that DAZN holds the broadcasting rights of Serie A matches (7 exclusive and 3 co-exclusive) until the 2023/24 championship.
Or even the fact that Amazon Prime Video has won the exclusive broadcasting rights of 16 Uefa Champions League matches for the next three years. The future of entertainment, then, is less and less on TV and more and more online.