Nearly one-third of anglophone Canadians subscribe to Netflix: report

TORONTO -- Netflix continues to grow in Canada and is being used in millions of households, suggest two research reports.

Telephone surveys commissioned by the Media Technology Monitor with 4,009 anglophone Canadians between Oct. 7 to Dec. 1 found that 29 per cent of the respondents said they were Netflix subscribers.

That was up nearly 40 per cent compared to MTM survey results from 2012. Based on the latest polling data, MTM estimates there are 5.8 million Canadians using Netflix to stream content.

Solutions Research Group Consultants estimates that three million Canadian households are using Netflix, based on an online poll conducted in November.

Of the Netflix users polled, almost nine in 10 said they found the $8-a-month subscription fee to be "excellent" or "good" value for their money, and the average user spent 1.5 hours a day watching TV shows or movies with the service.

That poll also revealed that 81 per cent of the respondents said they watch short online videos monthly and 56 per cent were watching long-form content.

MTM's polling suggests that more Canadians are connecting their TVs to the Internet to play online video on their biggest screen.

About 26 per cent of the respondents said they use their TV to access online content, which was up about 20 per cent from the previous year. MTM attributes the growing popularity of Netflix as the biggest reason for the increase.

Netflix, which launched in Canada in September 2010, no longer discloses how many Canadian customers it has.

It last reported the service had reached the one-million Canadian subscriber milestone just shy of its one-year anniversary in Canada, which was the company's first international market outside the U.S.

The results of the MTM poll conducted by Forum Research are considered accurate within 1.5 percentage points 19 times out of 20

The polling industry's professional body, the Marketing Research and Intelligence Association, says online surveys cannot be assigned a margin of error because they do not randomly sample the population like traditional telephone polls.