Russia ended 2016 with 41.2 million pay-TV subscribers, or 3.6% more than a year earlier.
At the same time, data produced by TMT Consulting show that pay-TV revenues rose by 10% to nearly R74 billion (€1.166 billion).
Of the 1.4 million pay-TV households that were added to the total in 2016, 70% opted for IPTV, with Rostelecom the main driver in connecting residents in small towns.
Rostelecom also experienced the strongest growth of any pay-TV provider in 2016, with its subscriber base growing by 8.8% to 9.4 million. Meanwhile, the DTH operator Orion Express dropped from first to third place in the growth table (5.5%), behind the cable operator ER Telecom with 6.4%.
Although the DTH platform Tricolor was still the leading provider of pay-TV services in Russia, its base grew by only 2.9% to 12.14 million. MTS is the fifth largest platform with 2.755 million, adding just 0.4% (without satellite).
The DTH sector as a whole gained 450,000 new customers, or only around half the 830,000 recorded a year earlier.
The Russian pay-TV market is projected to grow by 1.9% to 42 million in 2017.
