More Australians have Netflix than a home telephone

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From Roy Morgan Research:

The changing way Australians consume their media is starkly illustrated when looking at long-term trends for the technologies Australians use.

Over the course of the last year the proportion of Australians with access to subscription/pay TV services at home has increased to 66.5%, up 4.9% points from a year ago (61.6% in June 2018), and up a stunning 37.4% points over the last four years since June 2015 (29.1%).

Driving the increase has been the huge take-up of subscription TV or subscription video on demand (SVOD) service Netflix now accessible by around 11.5 million Australians. In total 57.1% of Australians now have access to SVOD services including Netflix as well as rivals such as Stan, Amazon Prime, YouTube Premium and others. Only four years ago less than 2% of Australians had SVOD.

The incredibly fast take-up of these new technologies, and the almost ubiquitous usage of mobile phones now used by 95.9% of Australians, has accelerated the decline in the proportion of Australians that have a home phone connected. Now less than half the population have a home phone connected (48.6%), down 9.5% points from a year ago.

In 2001 over 96% of Australians had a home phone connection. This has halved over the last two decades as new technologies including mobile phones, broadband internet and subscription TV have made increasing in-roads into Australian households.

These findings from the Roy Morgan Single Source survey are derived from in-depth face-to-face personal interviews with over 50,000 Australians each year in their homes.

Surely it is only a matter of time before public telephones also go the way of the dodo.

About the author
Leith van Onselen is Chief Economist at the MB Fund and MB Super. He is also a co-founder of MacroBusiness. Leith has previously worked at the Australian Treasury, Victorian Treasury and Goldman Sachs.