Traditional pay-TV and SVOD services are taking the lion’s share of the AV services market, according to a new report from the European Audiovisual Observatory.
Netflix is leading the pay-AV services sector in terms of subscriptions, while Liberty Global and Comcast are both driving the pay-TV subscriptions. Netflix and Amazon alone accounted for almost 80% of SVOD subscriptions in the EU.
The report says that cord cutting is not taking place uniformly across Europe and is very specific to national markets. “Each national market has been and is still shaped by very specific conditions, often exogenous to the pay audiovisual services, including purchasing power, supply of free services, penetration and performance of broadband access and, obviously regulation,” says the Observatory.
The increase in pay-AV subscriptions has been driven by SVOD but with a much lower ARPU than pay-TV Added to this the uptake of pay-TV slowed between 2013 and 2017.
“Due to the specific convergence of market factors, both pay-TV and SVOD uptakes and market shares paint a very different picture from one country to another as well as from one player to another. This is the result of a strong granularity of pay-AV services’ market strategies.”
The analysis has been carried out based on data from 34 European countries provided by Ampere Analysis.
