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Brits are locked inside their houses, shunning the sunny outdoors in favour of on-demand movies, new stats from Sky show.
During the first three months of 2013, the average number of weekly downloads from Sky’s catalogue of on-demand TV was a whopping 460 per cent higher than it was in the same period last year, the firm has boasted.
That was thanks to an average of 4.5 million on-demand downloads per week in the first quarter of the year. The significant increase chimes with a report from the BBC earlier this year that saw iPlayer visits leap 177 per cent in 2012.
For Sky, Daniel Craig-em-up Skyfall led a 37 per cent increase in movie rentals, the company says, with over 400,000 customers so far shelling out to watch Bond hopping around half-wrecked trains and murdering foes.
Elsewhere the blue-tinted broadcaster boasts that over 200 million movies were downloaded in the last 12 months, while on-demand episodes from the first two seasons of the great and gory Game of Thrones were watched 1.4 million times since the start of the programme’s third season.
Rather than streaming video over the Internet like iPlayer or Netflix, Sky makes customers download on-demand shows to their set-top box’s hard drive for offline viewing.
As a result, you have to wait a little while before your downloads are ready to view, but that doesn’t seem to be hindering download figures.
Are you a Sky customer, or would you rather save money and stick with Freeview? How often do you watch on-demand movies and TV? Share your viewing habits in the comments, or on our Facebook wall.
