The latest report from the Autoridade Nacional de Comunicações (ANACOM) reveals that in 2020 93.2% of Portuguese households already had the subscription television signal distribution service (TVS), which implies an increase of 5, 4% compared to the previous year. The number of pay TV subscribers reached 4.2 million, 163 thousand more (+ 4%) than the previous year.
The regulator indicated that it was not possible to identify statistical effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and the migration process of digital terrestrial television (DTT) on the evolution of the number of subscribers to this service.
The growth of pay TV in Portugal was due to offers supported by fiber optics (FTTH), which registered an additional 276 thousand subscribers compared to 2019 (+ 14.4%), reaching 2.2 million subscribers. This growth was due not only to the acquisition of new clients, but also to the transfer to FTTH of clients that were previously compatible with other networks.
Since 2018, fiber optics has been the main form of access to this service, reaching a 51.6% share at the end of 2020. It was followed by cable TV (31.1%), DTH (10.6%) and ADSL (6.8%).
At the end of 2020, MEO was the provider with the highest share of TVS subscribers (40%), followed by Grupo NOS (39%), Vodafone (17.3%) and NOWO (3.5%). In the residential segment, Grupo NOS maintained the largest share (39.8%), followed by MEO (38.6%), Vodafone (17.6%) and NOWO (3.9%).
Vodafone and MEO were the providers that, in net terms, had more subscribers than in the same period last year, with an increase in their participation of 1.1 and 0.4 percentage points, respectively. On the other hand, the shares of Grupo NOS (-1.1 percentage points) and NOWO (-0.4 percentage points) decreased.
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