The number of Portuguese households taking a pay-TV service increased by 160,000 during the first quarter of 2020.
The 4% increase year-on-year represents the strongest annual growth since 2016. As of March 31, 2020 Portugal had 4.1 million pay-TV subscribers.
Regulator Anacom, which released the figures, has attributed the growth to an increase in demand of fibre-to-the-home services, which recorded 271 thousand subscribers more than in the same quarter of the previous year. The 15.9% increase takes the installed base to 2 million customers, the most popular means of receiving DTT.
Cable’s 1.3 million customers (32%), are the second placed service with satellite in third place with 462,000 (11.2%) subscribing households. Satellite has seen an annual decline of 4.7%.
The trend has been evident since 2016, though one satellite provider did see an increase in the quarter, potentially impacted positively by the coronacrisis The DTT switchover of frequencies that began on 7 February 2020, was suspended on 13 March 2020 due to the constraints associated to Covid-19.
The NOS Group was the provider with the highest share of customers of the TV signal distribution service by subscription (39.9%), although this figure was below 40% for the first time, followed by MEO (39.7%), Vodafone (16.5%) and NOWO (3.7%).
