The Dutch TV market contracted again in Q2, down by 0.2 percent to 7.45 million subscribers. Only IPTV showed growth, while cable, satellite and DTT lost customers, according to the latest quarterly report from Telecompaper. TV revenues were still up slightly to EUR 464 million in Q2.
Despite losing customers in Q2, cable remained the most common way to receive TV, with 55.9 percent of connections. IPTV over DSL followed with 21 percent, after a 0.6 percent increase in connections. Fibre was third with a 15.8 percent share, while both satellite and DTT have less than 5 percent of the Dutch market.
Telecompaper expects the number of pay-TV subscribers to fall by 0.6 percent over the full year 2018. The contraction will accelerate due to the shutdown of analogue TV by the cable operators Delta and Ziggo. An increasing number of cord-cutters and cord-nevers will also impact the market.
TV market revenues are forecast to grow slightly over the full year, by 0.7 percent to EUR 1.85 billion. This is driven largely by price increases at providers including KPN, XS4ALL, Telfort and Ziggo, which should provide a boost in the second half of the year.
Revenues are expected to start to fall from 2020, according to Telecompaper’s long-term forecast. The average annual decline is estimated at 0.4 percent in the five years to 2022. The number of connections is expected to fall by an average 0.8 percent per year over the same period.
In terms of market share, Ziggo is still the biggest TV provider in the Netherlands with 52.4 percent of subscribers. Its share fell slightly, by 0.2 percent points year-on-year. KPN had 31.8 percent of the market, up by 0.4 percent points from a year ago.
A second tier of providers each took 4-5 percent of the market. M7, which includes satellite provider Canal Digitaal and the IPTV provider Online.nl, is the largest of these, with a 4.8 percent share in Q2, down 0.3 percent from a year earlier. Delta and Caiway, both owned by EQT, had a combined share of 4.4 percent, stable year-on-year, and the proposed combination of T-Mobile and Tele2 took 4.2 percent of the TV market in Q2, up by 0.1 percent from a year ago.