Nine out of ten households in Portugal received pay-TV services as of the end of the third quarter.
This, according to the regulator ANACOM, was 3.6 percentage points more than in the same period last year. The number pay-TV subscribers as of September 30 stood at 4.2 million, 157,000 (+4.1%) more than in Q3 2019. This was the highest annual growth in absolute terms since the end if 2015.
This growth was due to offers supported over FTTH, which registered an additional 270,000 subscribers compared to the same quarter last year (+ 14.6%), reaching 2.1 million. It resulted not only from attracting new customers, but also from the transfer to FTTH of customers who were previously supported on other networks.
FTTH has been the main form of access to pay-TV since 2018. In Q3, it surpassed the barrier of 50% of total subscribers (50.3%), followed by cable TV (31.5%), DTH (10.8%) and ADSL (7. 4%).
In Q3, Meo was the provider with the highest share of pay-TV subscribers (39.9%), followed by Grupo Nos with 39.4%, Vodafone Portugal – Personal Communications (Vodafone) with 17.0% and Nowoo Communications (Nowo) with 3.6%.
Vodafone and Meo were the providers that, in net terms, had the most subscribers in relation to the same period of the previous year, with their shares increasing 1.0 pp and 0.4 pp respectively.
On the other hand, the shares of Grupo Nos (-1.0 p.p.) and NOWO (-0.3 p.p.) both fell.
