ASIA-PACIFIC PAY TV REVENUES TO DECLINE $809 MILLION IN FIVE YEARS

Pay TV service revenue in Asia-Pacific is set to drop from US$61.6 billion in 2020 to US$60.8 billion in 2025 due to slowdown in pay TV household penetration, continued decline in cable TV subscriptions and fall in average spend per pay TV account in the region, according to data and analytics company GlobalData.

The “Asia-Pacific Pay-TV Forecast Pack” report reveals that pay TV subscriptions will slowdown or decline in some of the most advanced markets in the region such as Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia and Vietnam over the forecast period, as users swap their traditional pay TV subscriptions with over-the-top video alternatives. China leads the IPTV segment in terms of subscriptions and will go on to account for 80.2% of the total pay TV subscriptions in the region by the end of 2025.

Cable TV, which is currently the leading pay TV platform in the region, by subscriptions, will see its share in the total pay TV subscriptions decline over the forecast period. While the share of direct-to-home (DTH) services will witness marginal growth in the total pay TV subscriptions, Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) services will see maximum gain from 42.5% in 2020 to 53.5% by the end of 2025.

“There has been a rapid deployment of FTTH/B network in countries such as the Phillippines, Thailand, New Zealand and India, which has been a major catalyst for IPTV adoption in the region,”  said Kantipudi Pradeepthi, Research Analyst of Telecoms Market Data & Intelligence at GlobalData.

The growing demand for IPTV services will, however, fail to reverse the declining trend projected for the overall pay TV service revenues in the region over the forecast period as cord cutting by subscribers and competitive pricing/discounts offered by operators will continue to cause the average spend per pay TV account to stagnate or even decline.

“OTT-based video streaming platforms have caused massive disruption in the traditional pay TV services in the region. Introducing OTT offerings as a part of their product bundles or partnering with OTT players can help pay TV operators retain their customer base and improve their content proposition,”  Pradeepthi concluded.