In the first quarter of the year, the number of subscribers to the subscription television service (STVS) in Portugal reached 4.3 million, 153 thousand more (+ 3.7%) than in the same quarter of the previous year. The figures were provided by the Autoridade Nacional de Comunicações.
According to ANACOM, this growth was due not only to the acquisition of new clients, but also to the transfer to fiber optics of clients that were previously supported by other networks. In fact, offers supported on fiber optics (FTTH) registered an additional 285 thousand subscribers compared to the same quarter of the previous year (+ 14.4%), reaching 2.3 million subscribers.
Since 2018, fiber is the main form of access to this service. In the first quarter it represented 53.1% of total subscribers, followed by cable television, with 30.5%; satellite television (DTH) with 10.3%; and ADSL with 6.1%.
In this first quarter, MEO was the provider with the highest share of pay television service subscribers (40.3%), followed by Grupo NOS (38.5%), Vodafone (17.6%)) and NOWO (3 ,5%). In the residential segment, Grupo NOS maintained the largest share (39.5%), followed by MEO (38.8%), Vodafone (17.9%) and NOWO (3.8%).
MEO and Vodafone were the providers that, in net terms, attracted the highest number of subscribers to STVS compared to the same period last year, with an increase in their shares of 0.5 p.p. and one percentage point, respectively. On the other hand, the shares of Grupo NOS (-1.2 p.p.) and NOWO (-0.3 p.p.) decreased.
In the first quarter of 2021, 93.7% of households had this service, 5.2 percentage points more than in the same quarter of the previous year. The growth verified was due not only to the increase in the number of accesses, but also to the statistical effect of the decrease in the number of classic families (-1.9%).