The latest research from Ampere Analysis finds that global pay-TV penetration (the number of pay TV subscriptions relative to the number of households) will see its first yearly decline ever next year. This will follow pay TV penetration peaking at 60.3% in Q4 2023. By 2028, global pay TV penetration will have fallen by almost four percentage points by Ampere’s forecasts.
Pay TV decline has been driven by North America, but all regions will decline by 2025. In North America, pay TV penetration has almost halved from a high of 84% in 2009 to 45% in 2023, caused by a combination of high costs and competition from a mature Subscription Video-on-demand (SVoD) market. Despite this decline, the annual revenue generated per user will be over $1,100 in 2023 in North America, the highest across any region.
Latin America has also shown significant declines in penetration since 2016. This is led mainly by Brazil, which has posted a drop of roughly ten percentage points since its peak pay-TV penetration of 42% in 2016. Although North America and Latin America are driving this shift, all regions will be in pay-TV penetration decline by 2025.
Growth in pay TV has come primarily from Asia-Pacific and Europe. Asia Pacific and Europe have seen the highest penetration growth in recent years, with large gains coming from China Mobile after it acquired an IPTV license in 2018. This growth has primarily been driven by low-cost IPTV services, which are often bundled into broadband packages for a low or nominal cost. While these regions will also decline after 2025, some growth markets, such as Portugal, Serbia, and Hungary, are expected to grow further in the forecast period.
Rory Gooderick, Senior Analyst at Ampere Analysis, says: “Growth in global pay-TV uptake has been driven over the last five years by Asia Pacific and Central & Eastern Europe. However, declines coming from the Americas, which are driven by streaming competition and the high price of pay TV in North America, currently sitting at over $90 a month, will contribute to global pay TV penetration declining for the first time in 2024. However, despite the projected decline in the reach of pay TV products, cable, and satellite platforms will remain a powerful force in the TV world and important distribution partners for streaming products, as evidenced by the recent distribution deal between Disney and Charter in the US, which saw select Disney streaming services bundled into Charter’s TV packages. This package structure, already increasingly common in Europe and parts of Asia, offers a framework for traditional cable TV companies to transition their business into a streaming aggregation play and stabilize subscriber trajectories".
