Biggest video on demand services in the Netherlands 2019, by subscribers

Netflix and Videoland were the biggest video on demand services in the Netherlands, according to subscription numbers based on a survey held in 2019. Domestic provider Videoland, owned by RTL Nederland, reached roughly 750,000 households, whereas Netflix had nearly 3.2 million subscribers. The historical development of Dutch subscriptions to Netflix shows a continuous growth since the streaming giant was introduced in the Netherlands in 2014. Subscriber numbers slowed down in 2018 and 2019, due to already high penetration, but were still increasing. Amazon Prime Video, however, had significantly less subscribers. This might be because Amazon in the Netherlands is used relatively little when compared to other (domestic) web shops.

Originals from Netflix and Amazon Prime tend to do well in the Netherlands

Despite the relatively low number of subscribers to Amazon Prime Video in the Netherlands, there was one series that attracted some interest in 2019: The Grand Tour. The sequel to BBC series Top Gear was the Netherlands’ third most popular original series on a streaming platform. Other popular Amazon originals included The Man In The High Castle and Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan. Netflix Originals that were particularly on demand in the Netherlands in early 2019 were The Umbrella Academy, Star Trek: Discovery (made by CBS All Access but distributed by Netflix in the Netherlands) and Narcos. Videoland did not have an original in the list, but it was the Dutch in-market platform for Hulu series The Handmaid’s Tale.

The new kid on the block: Disney+

This ranking does not provide subscriber numbers for Disney+, as the service had not yet launched in the Netherlands (this happened on November 12, 2019, as the first country in Europe alongside the release in the US and Canada). There was a possibility for Dutch residents, however, to sign up to a beta test of the new streaming service for free. In the first week of this world-exclusive test (from September 13 up until September 20, the full test ran from September to November 2019), there were nearly 200,000 downloads of the Disney+ app. Industry experts believe that Dutch consumers will subscribe to the new VoD service but keep their Netflix subscription as well.