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Stan’s paying subscribers revealed

For months Stan executives have boasted about the platform's growing audience, defined by the vague term “gross sign-ups.”

Now it’s been revealed the streaming service co-owned by Nine Entertainment (NEC) and Fairfax Media had between 150,000-200,000 paying subscribers at the end of August.

Nine Entertainment CEO David Gyngell disclosed in the annual report issued last Friday that Stan was more than half way to its December 2015 target of 300,000- 400,000 active subscribers.  Daily run rates are consisted with that target, he added.

More than 800,000 people have trialled the service since the Australia Day launch, which suggests a conversion-to-paid rate of around 25 per cent.

That’s a fair result in an emerging market and well ahead of Presto’s estimated 100,000 paying customers.

Despite NEC’s boast that Stan has the biggest streaming library with more hours of content that the competition, it’s a long way behind Netflix, which some analysts reckon has more than 1 million paying subscribers in Australia.

The annual report also reveals NEC wrote off the value of its since-expired output arrangement with Warner Bros. by $57 million after admitting the deal had long been a drag on earnings.