The Dutch TV market continued its steady decline, with a loss for the fourth consecutive quarter, ending March 2016 with slightly more than 7.8 million connections.
This is according to Telecompaper’s latest quarterly report on the Dutch Television Market. During the quarter the market decreased by 8,000 connections or 0.1%, although digital TV grew by 0.4%. This was not enough to offset the quarterly drop of 4.7% for analogue TV connections. At the end of the first quarter, almost 90% of the TV connections were digital.
KPN continued to grow its share of the Dutch TV market, at the expense of cable operator Ziggo. KPN added 0.3% of market share in Q1 2016 to take 29.2% of subscribers, while Ziggo lost 0.5% for a share of 51.7%. KPN’s growth is mainly driven by IPTV via either fibre or DSL, growing by 2.8% to 1.93 million. KPN’s total customer base (including Digitenne and analogue TV via fibre from former Lijbrandt customers) grew by 1.3% during the quarter to 2.28 million. On the digital TV market, KPN won 0.4% of market share in the quarter to reach 32.2% of subscribers.
Ziggo has been unable to halt the ongoing decline in cable’s share, according to the report.The new Ziggo Sport channel, launched exclusively for Ziggo TV subscribers, may be helpful for customer retention but is unlikely to be enough to return the company to growth. Despite losing customers in Q1, Ziggo is still by far the market leader, with more than 4 million TV subscribers at the end of March 2016. Its digital TV subscriber base fell to 3.3 million, or 47.1% of the digital TV market.
KPN and Ziggo will have fewer customers to compete for in future, as Telecompaper expects the number of TV subscriptions to continue to fall. In the five years to 2020, the total TV market is expected to show an average annual decrease of 0.6%. Almost all households already have a TV connection and fewer are taking subscriptions for second TVs, instead watching video on tablets, computers and other devices. At the same time so-called ‘cord-cutters’ and ‘cord-nevers’ are abandoning traditional TV subscriptions altogether in favour of the growing number of online video services on the market.
Telecompaper estimates that the TV services market generated EUR 456 million in revenues in the first quarter of 2016, growing by 1 percent during the quarter. In the five years to 2020, TV revenues are expected to show an average annual decrease of 0.1 percent to around EUR 1.8 billion.