Netflix's ad-supported plan reached 8.1m UK homes in the third quarter of 2026, up from 7.3m three months earlier, according to figures Barb published today from its Establishment Survey. The cheaper tier now accounts for 44% of the 18.3m homes with access to Netflix, against 41% in the second quarter - a shift that outpaced growth in streaming itself, since the number of UK homes with at least one paid video service edged up only to 21.0m.

In Short

Barb's latest survey shows that 21.0m UK homes, or 71%, had at least one paid streaming service in the third quarter of 2026, and that 44% of Netflix homes and 43% of Disney+ homes now use plans with ads. For advertisers, the number of homes on ad-supported streaming plans grew several times faster than the number of homes paying for streaming at all. Growth in UK streaming now comes mainly from homes adding a second or third service and from shifts onto ad plans, with HBO Max entering the count at 3.1m homes.

The headline figure barely moved

Barb, the UK television industry's JIC, reported that 21.0m UK homes - 71% of the total - had access to a subscription video-on-demand service in Q3 2026. The comparable figure for Q2 2026 was 20.7m. Barb's Head of Insight, Doug Whelpdale, put the quarterly increase at 290,000 homes and noted that the count had passed 21m for the first time.

The quarter before that was not much different. Barb's Q1 2026 Establishment Survey, published on May 21, 2026, put the figure at 20.8m homes, or 70%, a number Sky Media cited when it opened its streaming inventory to Amazon Ads in October. The series therefore dipped slightly in the second quarter before recovering in the third. Roughly three in ten UK homes - 29%, by Barb's figures - still reported no access to any SVOD service at all.

What did grow was the number of services per home. Homes with two or more services rose by almost 600,000 in Q3 2026, to 15.4m, or 52% of all UK homes. Whelpdale drew the connection directly:

"Overall, the number of homes with an SVOD service passed 21m (71%) for the first time. With that only a 290k increase on Q2 2026, it suggests more viewers are accessing more than one service. This is backed by the number of homes with two+ services rising by almost 600k in Q3 2026 to 15.4m (52%)."

Some arithmetic sharpens the picture. Of the 21.0m homes with any SVOD access, 15.4m - about 73% - have at least two services, according to a PPC Land calculation from Barb's totals. Single-service homes therefore fell from roughly 5.9m in Q2 to about 5.6m in Q3. Added together, Barb's figures for the eight services it lists come to 57.4m home-level subscriptions, or roughly 2.7 per SVOD home, compared with about 2.6 for the seven services listed in Q2. Both numbers understate the true total, because Barb publishes only services with a household penetration above 5%.

Netflix: more homes on ads, fewer paying to avoid them

Netflix remains the most widely held service. According to Barb, 18.3m UK homes (61%) had access to Netflix in Q3 2026, up from 18.0m in Q2. Of those, 8.1m homes - 27% of all UK homes - were on its ad tier, up from 7.3m.

The gap between those two movements is the story. Netflix added about 300,000 homes in total, while its ad tier added about 800,000. On PPC Land's calculation, homes on Netflix's ad-free plans fell from about 10.7m to about 10.2m over the quarter. Barb's survey does not show whether that reflects households switching plans, ad-free subscribers cancelling while new ones joined on the cheaper tier, or some combination of the two; a churn figure is not part of the release.

Pricing offers one plausible backdrop, though not proof of cause. Netflix raised UK prices on all three plans in September, taking Standard with Ads from £5.99 to £7.99 a month, while Standard went from £12.99 to £13.99 and Premium from £18.99 to £20.99. The ad plan rose by more in absolute terms than Standard did, so the monthly gap between the two narrowed from £7.00 to £6.00 - again a PPC Land calculation. Barb's quarterly figure covers July to September as a whole, so a price change made during September cannot be isolated in it.

Netflix has leaned on Barb before. When it set March 1, 2027 as the start date for its ad plan in nine further EMEA countries, Netflix cited Barb data showing its UK ad plan reached more than 14 million viewers. That figure counts people, drawn from Barb's viewing measurement; today's 8.1m counts homes, drawn from the Establishment Survey. The two are not interchangeable, and the release does not attempt to reconcile them.

The UK is one of the five European markets where Netflix already sells advertising, alongside France, Germany, Italy and Spain. Its global ad ambitions have been trimmed: Netflix lowered its 2026 ad revenue expectation to about $2.7 billion from about $3 billion in its October 20 shareholder letter, citing a slower rollout of some ad product capabilities. A growing UK ad-tier base is a supply story; how much of that supply converts into revenue is a separate question the Barb numbers cannot answer.

Prime Video: the ad tier by default

Amazon Prime Video recorded the largest absolute gain of any service. Barb counted 14.3m UK homes (48%) with access in Q3 2026, up from 13.6m - an increase of about 700,000. Ad-tier homes rose to 12.7m (43% of UK homes) from 12.1m.

Barb flagged the difference in method. "Due to a different approach to moving homes to its ad tier, in Q3 2026, 89% of Amazon Prime Video homes were on its ad tier (on a par with the previous quarter)," the release states. That approach dates to January 2024, when Amazon defaulted Prime Video subscriptions to the ad tier and charged extra for ad-free viewing. In the US, Amazon has since raised the ad-free add-on from $2.99 to $4.99 a month and renamed it Prime Video Ultra, effective April 10, 2026. Barb's release does not cover UK pricing.

The consequence for ad supply is plain. Prime Video's 12.7m ad-tier homes exceed the ad-tier homes of Netflix and Disney+ combined, which come to 12.0m. Only about 1.6m Prime Video homes sit outside the ad tier, up from about 1.5m in Q2, on PPC Land's calculation.

Measurement has been catching up. Barb has reported reach and time spent viewing for Prime Video, Disney+ and Netflix since November 2021, using a panel of more than 5,000 homes combined with census-level online viewing data. Campaign measurement is another matter. In June, Barb said work to integrate Prime Video into CFlight, its campaign measurement tool, was under way, with no public completion date. Barb's Ads Hub, which combines CFlight and the Advanced Campaign Hub, launched on January 27, 2026 and had passed 600 active users by June 8.

Disney+ crosses 9m homes

Disney+ reached 9.0m UK homes (30%) in Q3 2026, up slightly from 8.9m. Its ad tier grew faster: 3.9m homes (13%), up from 3.6m, taking the share of Disney+ homes on the ad plan from 40% to 43%. As with Netflix, ad-free homes fell - from about 5.3m to about 5.1m, according to a PPC Land calculation.

The 9m threshold had not been crossed before. Whelpdale set it against the service's starting point: when Disney+ joined Barb's SVOD tracker in Q3 2020, it was in 3.9m homes. Six years later the total has more than doubled, and the number of Disney+ homes on its ad plan alone equals the service's entire base at entry.

The Disney+ ad plan is a relatively recent addition in the UK. Disney said in October 2023 that the UK and eight other European markets would get an ad-supported plan in November 2023, starting at £4.99 a month. Since then, the company has built out its European ad operations; Disney moved its EMEA campaigns onto its global ad server in June 2026, covering 15 European markets. Disney+ is integrated with more than ten DSPs, including Amazon DSP, The Trade Desk and Google DV360.

HBO Max enters the count at 3.1m

The newest name in Barb's table arrived with a sizeable base. According to Barb, 3.1m UK homes (10%) had access to HBO Max in Q3 2026, its debut in Barb's publicly announced SVOD data.

HBO Max is a recent entrant to the UK. Warner Bros. Discovery set March 26, 2026 as the launch date for the service in the UK and Ireland, according to the company. Before that, HBO programming reached UK viewers largely through Sky; in November 2025, PPC Land reported that Warner Bros. Discovery's Sky partnerships in the UK and Italy would expire at various points during 2026. The release does not say why HBO Max first appears in Q3 rather than in Q2, its first full quarter on the market.

Whelpdale's comparison was pointed:

"HBO Max has joined Barb's SVOD tracker for the first time. 3.1m UK homes report access to the service. That figure is comparable to the 3.9m homes that had Disney+ when it joined the tracker in Q3 2020. Disney+ surpassed 9m homes for the first time this quarter - something for HBO Max to aim for over the next six years."

At 3.1m, HBO Max matches Apple TV, sits ahead of NOW and trails Discovery+ and Paramount+. Barb publishes no ad-tier split for it; only Netflix, Prime Video and Disney+ receive that breakdown in the release.

Ownership complicates the comparison. Paramount closed its takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery on October 6, 2026, according to the Associated Press, putting HBO Max and Paramount+ under the same roof. That followed a long approval process: Warner Bros. Discovery accepted Paramount's $31-per-share offer on February 27, 2026, and Paramount said it expected the combined direct-to-consumer business to have a little over 200 million subscribers, with David Ellison indicating HBO would keep its own identity. The European Commission cleared the deal with conditions on July 22, 2026. In UK terms, Paramount+ (4.0m homes) and HBO Max (3.1m) add up to 7.1m home-level subscriptions, and Discovery+ - also a Warner Bros. Discovery service - adds another 3.6m. Those totals are not de-duplicated; many homes will hold more than one, and Barb does not publish overlaps between services.

HBO Max already has a route into UK ad buying. When Sky Media made its streaming supply available through Amazon Ads in the UK and Ireland, it named HBO Max, Discovery+ and TNT Sports as partner content on the same connection.

The rest of the table

Movements among the smaller services were modest. According to Barb:

  • Paramount+ was in 4.0m UK homes (13%), level with Q2 2026.
  • Discovery+ fell to 3.6m homes (12%) from 3.7m, the only decline among the services listed.
  • Apple TV rose to 3.1m homes (10%) from 2.8m.
  • NOW, Sky's streaming service, was flat at 2.0m homes (7%).

In relative terms, Apple TV grew fastest: its 300,000-home gain amounts to about 11% in a quarter, on PPC Land's calculation, against about 5% for Prime Video and under 2% for Netflix. Paramount+ and NOW did not move.

NOW's flat reading matters because of what Sky is doing elsewhere. Sky agreed terms in June to buy ITV's Media and Entertainment unit, including ITVX, in a deal Reuters described as an attempt to create one of the top three UK streamers. Free broadcaster services such as ITVX are BVOD rather than SVOD, and sit outside this survey entirely. So does YouTube.

What the survey measures, and what it does not

The Establishment Survey measures access reported by respondents. It is not a count of paying subscribers, and it is not a measure of viewing. Barb's release is explicit about the limits: "Caution should be applied when comparing Barb's sample-based numbers to audited numbers published by the SVOD services."

The reasons are practical. "Respondent recall of access to these services is subject to some uncertainty - this could occur where the respondent is not the subscriber in the household, the service is provided in a package with other services, or available via a third party that may not be immediately obvious to the viewer," the release states. Prime Video, for one, comes with an Amazon Prime membership, and a respondent may not think of it as a separate streaming subscription. The caveat is not a technicality.

Barb adds a second warning: "Users of panel data may also note that some SVOD services show larger reach than the data here would suggest." In other words, Barb's own viewing panel can register a service in more homes than respondents recall subscribing to. Barb's website terms describe all its data as the result of "accepted statistical sampling and survey procedures designed to produce estimates of television audiences within the limits of normal statistical error." The release does not publish margins of error, which leaves movements of 100,000 homes - Disney+, Discovery+ - difficult to distinguish from sampling noise.

Why the ad market watches this

For advertisers, the most relevant line in today's release is not the 21m total but the composition beneath it. Across Netflix, Prime Video and Disney+, ad-tier home subscriptions rose from 23.0m to 24.7m in a single quarter, according to a PPC Land calculation. That increase of about 1.7m is nearly six times the 290,000 growth in homes with any SVOD service. The figures are not de-duplicated - a home with all three ad tiers counts three times - but the direction is unambiguous: more of the UK's streaming base is now on plans that carry advertising.

That shifts the balance of supply. Prime Video's default approach has given it the largest ad-supported footprint, while Netflix and Disney+ are converging on a similar proportion of their bases, both now in the low-to-mid 40s. Is there a ceiling? The Barb data do not say. European survey data offer one point of comparison: RTL AdAlliance's Living Room Study, published in March, put ad-tier penetration across 17 European countries at 68% for Prime Video, 35% for Netflix and 40% for Disney+. That study surveyed individuals aged 18 to 64 rather than homes, so the figures are not directly comparable, though Barb's UK shares are higher for all three services.

Household budgets are the counterweight. A ShowHeroes and Omnicom Media study published in March found that UK and Italian households led the six European markets studied in adoption of free ad-supported streaming channels, at 37%, and that 59% of respondents across six markets wanted to lower their streaming costs. Rising service stacking in the Barb data and appetite for free alternatives in survey data are not contradictory: they describe a market in which homes hold more services and more of those services come with advertising in exchange for a lower price.

Measurement remains the friction point. Barb's household figures are an industry reference, but buying increasingly runs through platforms - Amazon Ads, DSPs, streamers' own sales teams - that report their own numbers. PPC Land has tracked Barb's pause of YouTube channel measurement after Google's legal letters in January, its effort to bring Prime Video into CFlight, and the Sky Media and Amazon Ads arrangement, whose release did not say whether those buys would be evaluated against Barb data. Today's figures confirm that the ad-supported streaming audience in the UK is growing. Who measures it, and against which standard, is still being settled.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Barb, the UK's television audience measurement body, with data on Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, Paramount+, Discovery+, Apple TV, NOW and HBO Max. Doug Whelpdale, Barb's Head of Insight, commented on the figures.

What: Barb's Establishment Survey found 21.0m UK homes (71%) had access to an SVOD service in Q3 2026, up from 20.7m. Netflix's ad tier reached 8.1m homes, or 44% of Netflix homes, up from 7.3m and 41%; Disney+ passed 9m homes with 43% on its ad tier; Prime Video kept 89% of its 14.3m homes on its ad tier; HBO Max entered the data at 3.1m homes; homes with two or more services rose by almost 600,000 to 15.4m.

When: Barb published the figures today, covering the third quarter of 2026 and comparing them with Q2 2026.

Where: The United Kingdom.

Why: Ad-tier home subscriptions at the three largest services grew by about 1.7m while total SVOD homes grew by 290,000, which means more of the UK streaming base now carries advertising. The data matter to advertisers planning video budgets, to streamers selling ad inventory, and to the measurement debate as more UK TV buying moves through platforms that report their own numbers.