STV Player has revealed that March was its best-ever month for video-on-demand (VoD) streaming, with the platform receiving a total of 11.6m million streams from viewers across the UK.
The free streaming service’s previous best-ever month was January 2021, when the UK was living through its third national Covid lockdown and TV streaming had surged across the board. STV Player’s VoD streams total in January 2021 was 10 million – meaning streams in March 2023 were up 16% on the previous record.
The platform has partly attributed the rise in streaming to its successful relaunch of classic soap Brookside, which it acquired in February to the delight of fans. After just one week, the show became the fastest to ever reach 1 million streams on STV Player, and it has since been streamed over 4 million times.
The success of Brookside has helped STV Player further establish itself as a standalone, UK-wide streaming service – separate to the Scotland-only STV broadcast channel – with over 100,000 new users being registered across the UK since the announcement of the soap’s return on 25 January.
STV Player also experienced its highest-ever quarterly streams performance in Q1 2023 with over 36 million streams of its extensive catalogue of content, mainly comprised of drama box sets from around the world. Irish crime thriller Redemption and Australian police procedural Rush were two of STV Player’s most-streamed dramas in Q1.
In Scotland – where STV Player’s catalogue also includes STV network content – March’s performance was boosted by the successful return of major crime drama titles, The Bay and Unforgotten. Both shows delivered higher audiences than previous series and were key drivers of growth on the platform.
Blockquote open It’s great that the power of Brookside shows no signs of waning, with the show continuing to perform extremely well and also leading viewers to discover the wealth of fantastic content sitting alongside Brookie on STV Player.
Richard Williams Managing Director of Digital, STV
The fact that we’ve beaten our previous, lockdown-influenced streaming record by 16% – purely based on the huge appeal of gripping shows like Redemption and Unforgotten – proves that STV Player has become many viewers’ go-to destination for free, high-quality TV series from around the world. I’m delighted to have them onboard and look forward to continuing our growth story.
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