Some 94.2% of households in Portugal were subscribing to a pay-TV service in the first half of 2021, according to new data from the communications regulator Anacom.
This represents a 5 percentage point increase on the same period in 2020.
The increase can be attributed both a rise in the number of connections, and a statistical effect caused by a decrease in the number of private households.
There were 4.3 million subscribers, 147,000 more than in the same period of 2020; of these, 3.8 million were residential customers (89.5% of the total) and 450,000 were non-residential subscribers (10.5%). The growth in the service was due to offers supporting fibre-to the-home (FTTH), which added 300,000 subscribers compared to the same period in 2020 (+14.8%), totalling 2.3 million subscribers. This growth resulted not only from the acquisition of new customers, but also from customers previously supported over other networks switching to FTTH.
Fibre has been the most popular way to access pay-TV services since 2018. It currently represents 54.4% of total subscribers, followed by cable television (30.1%), DTH Satellite (10.0%) and ADSL (5.5%).
MEO has the greatest number of subscribers (40.4%), followed by Grupo NOS (38.2%), Vodafone (17.8%) and NOWO (3.4%). Vodafone and MEO were the providers that, in net terms, attracted the most subscribers compared to the same period of 2020, with their shares increasing by 1.1 and 0.5 percentage points, respectively. Grupo NOS and NOWO both saw their share of subscribers decrease (-1.2 and -0.3 percentage points, respectively).
There was also an increase in the number of bundled subscriptions. In the first half of 2021, there were 4.3 million subscribers to bundles of services, an increase of 161,000 (+3.9%) compared to the first half of 2020.
MEO was the provider with the highest share of bundled service subscribers (40.8%), followed by Grupo NOS (36.2%), Vodafone (19.6%) and NOWO (3.4%).
