How did Subscriber Count Change for Global Streaming Services During Covid Lockdowns

A Statistical Analysis

Michael Bojczuk s3284442

Last updated: 01 June, 2021

This presentation is to go through Global Streaming Services subscriber count and see if the introduction of country wide lockdowns due to Covid-19 increased their subscriber count more than previous years of growth
The streaming services selected were Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Disney + and Apple TV +
Ma (2020) reports that the first case of Covid-19 dates to November 17 2019 in China
From there we see an infection rate that soon infects the world, with by March 24th 2020, more than one third of the world’s population is in some form of lockdown or restriction (CNN News, 2020)
Having lockdown measures enforced we expect to see some positive gain of people subscribing to global streaming services for more on demand entertainment

Data was gathered and compiled from numerous amounts of sources listed in the references section of this presentation
Subscriber count was changed into yearly subscribers for consistency as Hulu and Netflix provided quarterly information, Disney+ was monthly and Amazon Prime and Apple+ was yearly
The output of the data was changed into long data format after entry using tidyr for ease of splitting for colour and for faceting in later slides

In the first graph we show the total subscriber count of each platform at the end of each year finishing up in December 2020
Overlaying the information we can see a comparison of the services to each other
We can already see that the trend line for some services starts to rise faster then the previous year of growth

Faceted plots show the streaming services performance on its own without its comparison and we can track yearly progression by hovering the mouse cursor over each yearly point
We can still identify here that there is still a positive gain each year per streaming service even when most lockdowns occur

We seperate the more established streaming services to see if there was any change from one year to the other
Apple and Disney were left out due to only being in their second year of release and it’s hard to tell if they have fully established their viewer base yet
Both Netflix and Amazon Prime have seen an increase in growth from before lockdowns were introduced to during and Hulu has seen a decrease in its percentage growth

All streaming services did grow in subscriber count from 2019 to 2020 although this is hard to determine whether this was due to enforced lockdowns or not
The growth percentage from one year to the next was very small in established streaming services if not lower compared to previous years
The reason why this could be is that other circumstances affect a streaming services subscriber growth more than the state of the world
This could be what shows it currently has, specials or discounts, what shows are scheduled to be released and more
In terms of how did subscriber count change due to the introduction of lockdowns? we can say not much

CNN News. (2020, March 24). Nearly a third of the world’s population affected by coronavirus lockdowns. https://edition.cnn.com/world/live-news/coronavirus-outbreak-03-24-20-intl-hnk/h_baa02836c2ac602e0cfe2e3a0ea54617
Ma, J. (2020, March 13), Coronavirus: China’s first confirmed Covid-19 case traced back to November 17. https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3074991/coronavirus-chinas-first-confirmed-covid-19-case-traced-back
Iqbal, M. (2021, March 9). Netflix Revenue and Usage Statistics (2021). https://www.businessofapps.com/data/netflix-statistics/
Dean, B.(2021, March 20). Disney+ Subscriber Statistics 2021: How many people watch Disney+?. https://backlinko.com/disney-users#disney-subscribers-worldwide
Dean, B.(2021, March 4). Amazon Prime User and Revenue Statistics (2021) https://backlinko.com/amazon-prime-users
Dean, B. (2021, March 18). Hulu Viewership and Subscriber Statistics: How many people watch Hulu in 2021? https://backlinko.com/hulu-users#hulu-subscribers
Stoll, J. (2021, January 13) Estimated number of Apple TV Plus users in the United States 2019[Data Set]. Statista. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1136261/number-of-apple-tv-plus-subscribers-us/