Poland’s electronic communications market is undoubtedly one of the most vibrant in Central and Eastern Europe.
Take the on demand/OTT sector. It’s been clear for some time that despite the large number of services available, Netflix is the most popular. A monthly survey undertaken by Mediapanel for Wirtualne Media showed that in December it was viewed, via a browser or mobile app, by no fewer than 13.34 million internet users in the country. This gave it a reach of 44.9%, or three times more than TVN’s player.pl, its nearest challenger.
What is more, Netflix continues to grow in popularity. Between last August and December, it gained 1.4 million internet viewers at a time when the newcomer Viaplay was establishing a foothold in the market.
Most other services nevertheless continue to perform well, with HBO and Canal+ recently showing the strongest gains.
Meanwhile, the findings of a report by Nielsen Media have cast a light on the current state of play of the Polish TV market as a whole. It shows that as of the beginning of this month no fewer than 69.2% of households, or 9.87 million, received either cable or DTH services. This was an impressive 670,000 more than in the same period last year.
However, while the number of cable homes continued to increase, from 4.01 million to 4.76 million in 2021, the DTH total fell from 5.19 million to 5.01 million. At the same time, the number of terrestrial-only TV homes fell significantly, from 5.03 million to 4.41 million.
While Poland has a large number of FTA terrestrial TV channels, with more, including a 4K service from the public broadcaster TVP, soon likely to be added to the list, the biggest change this year will be the transition to the DVB-T2 standard. It will be interesting to see how this will impact the still significant number of homes that rely solely on terrestrial TV for their viewing.
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