Although SVOD growth is outstripping pay-TV in Poland, the trend is less extreme than that seen in Western Europe.
In a wide-ranging presentation at PIKE 2016, Guy Bisson, research director, Ampere Analysis, said that the country still has low SVOD penetration (16% of homes) compared to large Western markets, with Scandinavia – and in particular Sweden and Denmark, on 53% and 59% respectively – the driver for change.
Poland is also average for SVOD bundles (1.47 per SVOD home) but beginning to show the same behaviours as the rest of Europe.
Interestingly, Polish SVOD homes are driven by movies, picture quality and finding good TV. Furthermore, while building their own bundles they are still engaged with pay-TV driven OTT. Subscribers to ipla, for instance, are 6.5 times more likely to have Netflix and 10 times more likely to opt for TVP.pl.
Commenting on Netflix, Bisson said that its growth has hitherto been dependent on international expansion. However, now that it is available in almost every country, this will change.
In the case of Poland, the country will become a big little Netflix market compared to Western Europe.
Bisson also made the point that Netflix already spends a similar amount on content as a broadcast or premium channel group. While still behind Sky, it should catch up to its spending level by 2019/2020.
