Survey Claims UK Homes Losing Interest in Broadband and TV Bundles

A new Opinium survey of 2,002 UK adults, which was commissioned by ISP Zen Internet, has claimed that 2 million of the 10 million UK households that have a broadband and TV bundle are considering unbundling themselves from the package “due to a lack of value” and 1.7 million have already done so.

The rise in cheaper video streaming services (NOW TV, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+ etc.) takes much of the blame for this, with Zen claiming that streaming services offer the “most value for money” (i.e. the average service costs subscribers just 23p per hour watched, which is a lot less expensive than the average sports package at £1.30).

On the flip side 2.9m households feel they pay too much for their TV services, but admit they don’t want to lose access to them. This is backed up by further evidence with sports channels, such as Sky Sports (73%) and BT Sport (67%), rated as important despite their high cost per viewing hour.

However, when it comes to children’s entertainment, just 47% of households viewed dedicated kids channels as important, despite their relatively low cost-per-hour value (16p). We suspect that if young children were asked the same question, instead of adults, then the response might be a little different.

Streaming Statistics

* During the COVID-19 lockdown over lockdown 1.6 million households signed-up to a new streaming service and intend to keep it. A further 1.6m households are also considering increasing the number of subscriptions they have over the next 12 months.

* Young people are much more likely to subscribe to a streaming service, with 76% of 18-24 year olds paying for Netflix (50% average), 51% paying for Amazon Prime TV (38% average) and 28% paying for Disney+ (16% average).

* 28% of houses have at least one streaming service alongside their TV licence, amounting to 7.7 million households. A further 6.1 million households have two streaming services, while 3 million have three streaming services.

* 1.3 million households have no idea when their annual TV subscription ends and 800,000 never pay attention to changes in the price of their streaming service subscriptions.

Richard Tang, Founder and Chairman of Zen, said:

“Even before the pandemic hit, it was clear to see viewing habits were changing with increased popularity of streaming services versus traditional TV packages. However, there are still a lot of people that rightfully don’t want to lose out on their TV subscriptions.

Fortunately, with the emergence of ultrafast broadband, consumers no longer need to be tied into broadband and tv bundles where they’re getting value from some channels, but not from others. Today, consumers should know they can pick and choose their channels and services without being tied to a bundle, including their favourite sports packages, making use of a separate broadband connection that reliably underpins it all.”

One problem with all this is that individual streaming services rarely provide the same amount of content as a traditional TV subscription, which can include hundreds of premium channels. As a result, it’s often necessary to subscribe to several streaming services and even then, you won’t get everything. Suffice to say that streaming alone is not a complete answer and the extra choice also makes it harder to find the content you want.

As you might expect Zen Internet probably has somewhat of a vested interest in casting shade over TV bundles because they don’t offer a traditional Pay TV solution of their own, although they do make some fair points.