ONS: 46% of UK adults use services like Netflix

The proportion of UK adults who watched on-demand video from commercial services like Netflix has risen from 29% in 2016 to 46% in 2018, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

While the ONS said that the most popular online activity in 2018 is sending or receiving emails, with 84% of adults doing this, it noted the “large growth in the proportion of adults who watched videos online”.

Some 62% of adults in the UK were found to watch videos on YouTube or similar services in 2018, up 15 percentage points from 47% in 2016.

“There were some differences in the activities that men and women carried out over the internet, with a higher percentage of women using it for social networking (69%), compared with men (60%),” said the report.

“However, the proportion of men who watched videos on YouTube or similar was 13 percentage points higher than women, at 69% and 56% respectively.”

Overall, the ONS reported that 89% of adults in Great Britain used the internet at least weekly in 2018, up from 88% in 2017 and 51% in 2006.

The Office for National Statistics is the UK’s recognised national statistical institute and is its largest independent producer of official stats.