By Jonathan Easton
Pay TV subscribers in Portugal increased by 160,000 in Q1 2020, the strongest year-over-year growth for the country since 2016.
According to Autoridade Nacional de Comunicações (Anacom) – Portugal’s national regulatory authority for the communications sector – there were 4.1 million subscribers by the end of March. This translates to 89 per cent of households in the country having some form of pay TV subscription, 3 per cent more than Q1 2019.
Anacom attributed this growth to the increased coverage of FTTH, which saw a year over year increase of 271,000 (15.9%) to a total of 2 million. Fibre continues to be the main means of accessing TV, accounting for 48 per cent of the total.
Cable is the second most prominent with 1.3 million customers (32.2%) followed by Satellite (DTH), which suffered a 462,000 (4.7%) decline to 11.2 per cent of the total. Also in decline is ADSL which charted a loss of almost 20 per cent to make up 8.5 per cent of subscribers.
The body noted that DTH’s decline has slowed – in Q1 2019 it fell by 9.1 per cent Anacom suggested that this stunted decline was as a result of the state of emergency which was enforced on March 19.
This state of emergency also impacted the DTT switchover of frequencies which was started on February 7 and suspended on March 13.
The NOS Group was the largest Portuguese pay TV operator with 39.9 per cent of customers, though only marginally ahead of MEO with 39.7 per cent. Vodafone with 16.5 per cent and NOWO with 3.7 per cent make up the rest with both capturing the most subscribers in relation to Q1 2019. https://www.digitaltveurope.com
