Netflix Watched by 1.42M People in Australia

Netflix likes to make extremely calculated moves based heavily on any number of data points.

For example, there is a famous story of how Netflix used viewership data to determine a political drama starring Kevin Spacey would be a guaranteed success with subscribers. Or perhaps a slightly lesser known example is that Netflix uses piracy data to determine what demand there is for content in order to purchase streaming rights to shows and movies that will attract the most new customers.

Recently, Netflix has been talking big about international expansion, and has certainly been deploying an aggressive strategy to get the streaming service actively deployed into several international regions.

Australia was a prime target, as many citizens down under had proclaimed that they were actively using VPNs into US Netflix accounts just to get some of that sweet, sweet binge watching power. This made the region a great country to expand into with all this supporting demand.

And if recent reports are to be believed, Netflix has knocked it out of the park.

Roy Morgan Research is reporting that Netflix has over 1.42 million people in Australia watching movies and TV shows on the service, spread through about 550,000 individual homes. This basically means that 16.8% of broadband homes in Australia have already signed up for their own Netflix accounts. No small feat and certainly a growth number that Netflix can be happy with from such a short time period (for comparison, about 35% of US households with broadband internet use Netflix).

Tim Martin, General Manager at Roy Morgan commented that all this new bandwidth usage can put some strain on local providers:

“For internet service providers, Netflix can be a double-edged sword. Rapid uptake can see internet traffic soar, with significant and targeted network investment required to keep pace with the demand. NBN Co in particular will need to keep a close eye on how subscription video on demand affects adoption rates in particular areas.”

We’ll keep our eyes on this growth, as well as continually monitor Netflix expansion in other regions.