Nielsen: Poles increasingly paying for online video

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Audience measurement outfit Nielsen has released Videonauts 2023, its latest report focusing on viewer behaviours and habits related to the consumption of video content across four screens in Poland.

The report, which is issued every two years, showed that 50% of Poles aged 16-74 with internet access now pay for video content.

This is the combined result of paying both by subscription and pay-per-view, and represents an increase from 43% compared to 2021. The vast majority of viewers paying for video content use subscription services: 40% (up from 31% from 2021), and the scale of pay-per-view remains similar (17% in 2023 and 2021).

The study found that those paying for subscriptions jointly with others and sharers who do not pay for a service account for a significant share of viewers of VOD platforms (between 23% and 47% of viewers).

Joanna Kopeć, research and insights lead at Nielsen, said: “The dynamism of the Video-on Demand (VOD) market, the ease of buying but also of cancelling subscriptions, makes paying users a constantly changing group. This effect is reinforced by the widespread account sharing that applies to most major subscription VOD platforms. We can clearly see in this year’s survey that legacy sharing has turned into complex networks of dependencies, providing users with access to a variety of content. Sharing doesn’t only apply to video content too, but also music content, such as Spotify, where we also see this happening.”

Despite the growing popularity of paying for VOD services, only 8% of pay TV service users are considering dropping their services from cable and satellite platforms.

The study also found that 2% of viewing in the first half of 2023 was streaming TV content on the TV screen.

Viewing YouTube on TV screens has meanwhile increased by more than 43% among viewers aged 4-74 in the last year and now accounts for 24% of YouTube’s total four-screen viewing.