Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Disney+ continued to see growth in ad-supported reach in the UK last quarter, according to Barb’s latest Establishment Survey, with households on the Disney+ ad tier seeing the highest growth rate compared with Q4 2025.
However, Prime Video remains the largest ad-supported SVOD subscriber base in the UK, by virtue of defaulting all members to its ad-supported plan. This means 88 percent of Prime Video households were on its ad tier in Q1 2026, reaching 12 million UK homes (40.4 percent of UK homes), up from 11.9 million the previous quarter. But Prime Video’s ad-supported household penetration is also the same as it stood in Q2 2025, suggesting its reach has plateaued.
Meanwhile 40 percent of Netflix homes were on its ad tier in Q1, reaching 7.2 million UK homes, up from 6.9 million in Q4 2025. As a result, 24.4 percent of UK homes now have access to Netflix’s ads plan. The number of ad-supported Netflix households grew by 4 percent over the quarter, and has grown by 50 percent year-on-year.
But Disney+ saw the highest growth in households with access to its ad-supported tier at almost 8 percent last quarter, and year-on-year growth of 65 percent. The streaming service had 2.8 million UK households (9.6 percent of UK homes) on its ad tier in Q1 2026, up from 2.6 million. But Disney+ also has the lowest share of its subscribers on its ads plan of the three major services, with 37 percent of its member households subscribing to the ad-supported tier.
Netflix stays ahead
Overall the number of UK homes with access to an SVOD service (either ad-supported or ad-free) grew by almost 1 percent in Q1, with 20.8 million UK homes having an SVOD subscription, up from 20.6 million in Q4. That means 70.3 percent of UK households now have access to an SVOD service, marking the first time SVOD household penetration has surpassed 70 percent in the UK.
And Disney+ also saw the highest growth rate in terms of overall subscriber households, reaching 7.8 million UK homes (26.1 percent of households), up from 7.6 million. But Netflix is the largest SVOD service in terms of total reach at 61 percent of UK homes, totalling 18.1 million, up from 18 million the previous quarter.
Interestingly Amazon actually lost total subscriber households, despite the slight growth in its ad-supported homes. In Q1, 13.7 million households (46.1 percent of UK homes) had access to Prime Video, down from 13.8 million in Q4.
Among the remaining SVOD services, Discovery+ grew from 3.4 million to 3.5 million UK households (11.8 percent of UK homes), putting it on the same level of penetration as Paramount+, which was flat compared with the previous quarter. NOW was also flat at 2 million households (6.8 percent of UK homes), while Apple TV+ saw 3 percent growth, reaching 3.1 million (10.4 percent of households), up from 3 million in Q4.
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