The second quarter results currently being reported by providers of TV services across Central and Eastern Europe make for interesting reading.
In the case of Liberty Global’s, published late last week, they showed continued growth in the take-up of digital cable services and a steady performance by the DTH platforms UPC Direct and Focus Sat. Even UPC Romania, a constant source of speculation, achieved better than expected subscriber numbers.
TV is also becoming an increasingly important source of revenues for some of the region’s leading telcos in what are difficult economic times. In Hungary, for instance, financially troubled Magyar Telekom continues to see strong growth in the take-up of both its DTH and IPTV services, which taken together are now received in more homes than its long-established cable operation. Its subsidiaries in Montenegro and Macedonia are also steadily growing their IPTV subscriber bases.
Meanwhile in Romania, Romtelecom, despite posting a lower loss in the second quarter than a year earlier, now has over 1.2 million subscribers to its DTH, IPTV and cable services. In Slovakia, the incumbent has reached a new landmark in terms of TV take-up (150,000), and it has just been reported that Skylink has a combined total of 1.5 million active card users in the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
However, it is also becoming increasingly clear that this subscriber growth cannot continue at such a pace, especially as markets start to mature. This is certainly now the case in Poland, where the number of viewers receiving cable services has remained relatively constant at around 4.5 million for some time and the DTH sector is arguably in the final stages of subscriber growth before leveling off, probably next year.
Perhaps the most interesting statistic to be published in recent days is one that pertains to the pay DTT operation in Hungary, which ended the second quarter with just over 31,000 subscribers. Pay DTT is still relatively rare in the CEE region, with Estonia being one of the first countries to introduce such a service, and it remains to be seen if it can succeed in other markets.
