STV Player streaming service sees viewing double amid lockdown boost

Broadcasting group STV said its video-on-demand service had delivered a record-breaking start to 2021 following “a year of exceptional growth”.

Scottish broadcasting group STV hailed the positive impact from series such as 'word-of-mouth hit' The Bridge.

The STV Player streaming platform delivered 12.5 million streams in January, a surge of 115 per cent on the same month last year.

Online viewing doubled year-on-year, with a total of six million hours spent consuming content on the STV Player throughout the month. The number of monthly active users on the service grew by a fifth in January.

With people stuck at home for longer under lockdown restrictions, movie and TV streaming services such as the STV Player have enjoyed a boost.

Glasgow-headquartered STV said its addressable audience “increased considerably” after the player was added to Sky Q across the UK in December, following UK-wide launches on Freeview Play and Virgin Media earlier in 2020. It is now pre-installed in more than 17 million UK broadband-enabled homes – around 70 per cent of the total.

Network drama box sets have also given the figures a fillip, with The Bay being streamed 1.7 million times, and the new series of Marcella attracting 700,000 streams in just six days after being added to the platform on January 26.

Comedy drama Finding Alice was streamed one million times, as was “word-of-mouth hit” The Bridge, an STV Player-exclusive series.

The group noted that, in addition to The Bridge, the platform offered “an ever-increasing range of high-quality multi-genre titles”, including US dramas such as Gracepoint and Detective McLean, Australian boxsets The Slap, Janet King and Devil’s Dust, critically-acclaimed Irish series Striking Out, plus hundreds more entertainment and documentary series.

It is also home to a back catalogue of classic content, such as Taggart, Rebus and Take the High Road.

Richard Williams, managing director of digital at STV, said: “We’re only one month into 2021 but we’ve already delivered a record-breaking performance for the STV Player, which has exceeded all expectations.

“We spent much of last year working to ensure that viewers across the UK could enjoy the fantastic free content available on our platform, and we’re delighted to see so many of them are now doing exactly that.”

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