With governments across the continent asking their citizens to stay home as the COVID-19 pandemic gets worse, streaming services have seen a spike in user registration and overall streams.
ShowMax is one company that has seen a spike in the number of people logging in to its platform to stream their favourite TV shows and movies.
ShowMax has revealed that the number of active users on its platform has gone up by 50% while the play events have more than doubled from pre-crisis peaks. ShowMax defines active users as the number of people who use the service every single day. The company says that on its platform, the number follows a weekly pattern with lulls on Wednesday and Thursday and viewing building up from Friday and peaking on Sunday.
“February and early March followed this pattern with no surprises, but then there was a significant divergence from Monday 15 March,” said ShowMax. “
“On that day, instead of the number of active customers dropping off it stayed almost at the Sunday peak and then started rising for six days straight. There was then a big jump on Friday 27 March and the upward trend has continued from there. The number of active users on Showmax is roughly 50% higher now than the pre-crisis peak in early March,” the company revealed.
ShowMax described a Play event as a situation where a user clicks play on a TV show, movie or live channel, and that follows the same pattern of a mid-week trough growing to a Sunday peak. But in this instance the Sunday peaks had already started getting higher in late February and by 15 March the number of play events was more than 20% higher than a month earlier (this is measuring peak to peak). “From that point onwards, we saw really rapid growth, with the peak this past weekend more than double the peak in viewing events in mid-February,” revealed the company.
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