Netflix UK Report Virgin Media Broadband Still Fastest for Video Streaming

Netflix UK‘s unlimited Internet movie and TV video streaming service has published its final ISP Speed Index update for December 2013, which reveals that Virgin Media continued to deliver the best performance for its service and BT came a close second.

As usual the data only reports on the biggest broadband providers and their ratings reflect the average performance of all Netflix video streams on each ISP, which means that it shouldn’t be taken as a measure of general end-user internet connectivity speed or capability. Note: we have removed O2 from the list because their home lines are being migrated to Sky.

Please take note that video streaming speeds can be affected by all sorts of factors, such as the dynamic nature of different video codecs, the performance of your home network (especially wifi), ISP traffic management measures and varying video quality. As a result this index might help you find a better ISP for Netflix but it doesn’t reflect the performance of other online services like a general speedtest.

NetflixUK – Major ISP Rankings (December 2013)

1 – Virgin Media 2.99Mbps (up from 2.65Mbps in Sep 2013)

2 – BT 2.66Mbps (up from 2.39Mbps in Sep 2013)

3 – Sky Broadband 2.44Mbps (up from 2.27Mbps in Sep 2013)

4 – TalkTalk 2.35Mbps (up from 2.21Mbps in Sep 2013)

5 – EE 2.32Mbps (up from 2.24Mbps in Sep 2013)

It’s worth pointing out that Virgin Media recently became the first Pay-TV provider in the United Kingdom to offer Netflix via their TiVo based broadband Video-on-Demand (VoD) platform (here).

It will be interesting to see what kind of impact the forthcoming 2014 introduction of 4K (Ultra HD) content has on these results, although we expect to see the average streaming speed rise among ISPs with a greater proportion of superfast subscribers.

We’ll take another look at Netflix’s results later in the year because the data doesn’t change much on a monthly basis.