With approximately 220 million paying subscribers worldwide, Netflix continues to be the king of video streaming. But faced with a rising number of competitors, the company has found it increasingly difficult to grab more market shares. Having been a winner of the "containment economy" of the coronavirus pandemic, the video-on-demand leader is now losing momentum and even recorded a first decline of its subscriber base in the first quarter of 2022.
But even if these current developments are clouding the growth prospects of the video-on-demand and streaming market, they remain significant on an international scale. According to estimates from the Statista Digital Market Outlook, the penetration rate of video-on-demand services worldwide is around 20 percent in 2022. This estimate covers subscription video-on-demand, pay-per-view and video download platforms.
As our map shows, the most promising markets for chasing video-on-demand users are now South Asia, Latin America and Africa, where Disney+ has arrived in several countries (including South Africa) in 2022. While the market is expanding more slowly in North America, where video-on-demand has reached approximately 50 percent of the population, there is still some more room to grow in Europe, where this figure varies from 14 percent in Bulgaria to 42 percent in the United Kingdom.
