The number of pay TV subscribers in Portugal has increased. In fact, 94.2% of households in the country subscribed to pay TV services in the first half of 2021, which is up 5% year-over-year, according to new figures from local regulator Anacom (Autoridade Nacional de Comunicações).
Overall, there were 4.3 million subscribers, 147.000 more than in the same period of last year. Of these, 3.8 million were residential customers (89.5%) and 450.000 were non-residential subscribers (10.5%). The growth in the service was due to offers supporting fibre-to the-home (FTTH), which added 300.000 subscribers compared to the same period in 2020 (+14.8%), totaling 2.3 million subscribers. This growth resulted not only from the acquisition of new customers, but also from customers previously supported over other networks switching to FTTH.
At the same time, fibre has been the most popular way to access pay TV services since 2018. It currently represents 54.4% of total subscribers, followed by cable television (30.1%), DTH Satellite (10.0%) and ADSL (5.5%).
In terms of providers, MEO was the largest pay TV operator with 40.4% of the market. The company was followed by Grupo NOS (38.2%), Vodafone (17.8%) and NOWO (3.4%). Vodafone and MEO gathered the most subscribers, increasing their shares of clients by 1.1% and 0.5%, respectively. On the other hand, Grupo NOS dropped 1.2% of subscribers, while NOWO was down 0.3%.