Seventy-eight percent of Anglophone households currently subscribe to at least one SVOD service in Canada, down from a high of 83% in the fall of 2023, according to the latest Media Technology Monitor (MTM) report.

The drop is more noticeable for individual services, most notably Netflix, which is still the most popular SVOD, but its penetration has declined to 60% from a peak of 72%, the report states.

In 2022, nearly half of households subscribed to three or more services. However, in the spring of 2024, only 39% said they subscribe to three or more services. Almost a quarter of households said they altered their SVOD services to save money, with 15% cancelling one of their services and another 9% reducing or changing their SVOD subscriptions.

Anglophone households report spending an average of more than $40 a month on SVOD services. And 49% of anglophones subscribe to both SVOD and linear TV.

While Netflix is still the leading SVOD service, Amazon Prime Video is the second most popular, with Disney+ in third, followed by Crave. Despite the popularity of YouTube, YouTube Premium, which launched in 2018, remains a niche service with only 11% of anglophone households as subscribers.

Just under a tenth of Anglophone households subscribe to a sports SVOD. These services have different market pressures from other SVODs – because of different rights deals with sports organizations, fans require multiple services to watch various content. Additionally, sports leagues are making deals with entertainment SVODs, such as NHL on Amazon Prime Video, WWE on Netflix, American contracts for the NFL on Amazon Prime, MLB on Apple TV+, and ESPN content on Disney+.

On average, SVOD viewers report watching 8.6 hours of content in a typical week. They report watching more than 27 hours of content across a number of platforms, including linear TV.

Connected TV is the most commonly used screen for SVODs with three-quarters of viewers watching via CTV. However, MTM also found that SVODs on smartphones and computers – while done by more than two-fifths of viewers – is less common than watching YouTube on those screens.

The initial appeal of SVODs was that they were ad-free for a monthly subscription fee. Some services have introduced more affordable price tiers: a fifth of Crave viewers are opting for a cheaper subscription fee. A sixth of Netflix viewers and an eighth of Disney+ viewers are seeing ads on their services while 15% of Amazon Prime Video subscribers pay a premium to avoid seeing the commercials that were added to the standard package.