The total number of subscribers to the subscription TV signal distribution service (TVS) reached 4.1 million at the end of 2019, which represents a growth of 3.7% over the previous year, which corresponds to 147 thousand new subscribers. This was reported by the Portuguese regulatory agency ANACOM.
The growth in pay TV service was exclusively due to offers backed by fiber optics, which registered 285 thousand more subscribers compared to the previous year, which translates into an increase of 17.5%. The remaining technologies had a negative performance in 2019, decreasing 20.2% in the case of ADSL (less 93 thousand subscribers), 6.9% in the use of satellite - DTH (less 34 thousand subscribers) and 0.7% in the distribution of cable TV (less than 10,000 subscribers).
Since the first quarter of 2018, the main form of access to the subscription television service, fiber optics reached around 1.9 million subscribers (46.9% of the total) at the end of 2019, followed by television. cable, with around 1.3 million subscribers (32.7%), DTH technology, with 464 thousand subscribers (11.4%), and ADSL, with 370 thousand (9.1%). At the end of 2019, around 88% of families had TVS, 2.7 percentage points more than in the previous year.
In market terms, Grupo NOS was the provider with the highest proportion of TVS subscribers (40.1%), followed by MEO (39.6%), Vodafone (16.3%) and NOWO (3.9%).
Vodafone and MEO were the providers that, in net terms, had more subscribers than in 2018, and their shares increased by 1.1 and 0.4 percentage points, respectively. In contrast, the shares of Grupo NOS (less 1.1 percentage points) and NOWO (less 0.4 percentage points) decreased in 2019.