Across physical media and streaming, 2023 was an impressive one for home entertainment in the UK, with the sector worth £4.9bn – an increase of 10 percent.
The UK home entertainment category – taking in everything from physical media to streaming services and the plethora of different digital options – rose by more than 10 percent in 2023 to a staggering £4.9bn in value.
Much of that came from the continued growth of streaming services, with Netflix and its contemporaries enjoying a 5.4 percent year on year increase with 56 million subscriptions over the past 12 months – a total that is now nearing one per head for the UK population.
The impressive figures come off the back of more than 14 percent growth in the previous year. Released by trade organisation BASE, they take in every home entertainment option, including Streaming Video on Demand (SVoD), digital, disc sales, and rental, covering the array of Premium Electronic Sell Through (PEST), Electronic Sell Through (EST), Premium Video on Demand (PVoD), Video on Demand (VOD), DVD, Blu-ray, 4K UHD, and box sets.
The headlines make for some impressive reading, not least for Barbie, the undisputed winner at both theatrical and home entertainment. It grossed £95.5m at the box office and a tenth of that, £9.5m, across home entertainment formats. It equated to £200 spent every minute in 2023.
Rental title of the year was John Wick 4, with 306,000 sales on VOD with disc and EST sales of 388,000. It has now earned more than £21 million as a franchise on home entertainment formats (excluding VOD).
Avatar: The Way Of Water topped combined disc and EST sales with 560,000 units, while Oppenheimer was the not entirely unsurprising disc bestseller of 2023, earning Universal £1.1m on Blu-ray and £673,000 on DVD. The top five bestsellers across all formats was rounded off by Matilda The Musical.
Other notable successes included a surprising bestseller on DVD in the shape of Black Adam. It belied the “who still buys DVDs?” myth by shifting some 80,000 units.
The best-selling premium release was Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour, which took almost £500,000 in its first week after its £12.2m in cinemas. The Super Mario Bros Movie was the biggest kids’ title, while Game Of Thrones: House Of The Dragon was the biggest TV title for the second year running,
Liz Bales, Chief Executive, BASE said:
“It’s genuinely wonderful to see the volume of units purchased and the range of titles in 2023’s top five UK buy, rent and own Home Entertainment chart, as it perfectly demonstrates the convenience and breadth of this part of the Home Entertainment offering, and how much consumers value that.
“Audiences can control when and where they watch the films, TV shows and special interest programming they love, in a completely complimentary way to the SVoD services they invest in, which is shown in those fantastic final week figures of 2023: Home Entertainment titles were bought, downloaded and rented nearly one million times across digital and physical in that week alone, in addition to the multiple SVoD and linear TV options.
“When we look back at 2023, and the resurgence of HMV in particular, which opened 24 new stores in the UK, and with 38 stores in total, we can see that servicing the fans, and the appetite for physical releases on the UK high street, as well as an incredibly healthy EST and rental market, is incredibly important.”
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