PPV in free fall in Spain
May 13, 2013
From David Del Valle in Madrid
Pay-per-view is becoming less and less popular in Spain. The rent of PPV services is dramatically falling with a drop of almost 1 million (859,935) in one year, according to data from the CMT, the Telecommunications Market Commission. Last year saw 1,571,597 registered PPV sales against 2,431,533 in 2011. By comparison, in 2009 and 2008 the acquired PPV services reached 3.4 million and 7 million, respectively.
In 2012, most of the 1.5 million acquisitions were movies (1,478,543) with only 3,020 football matches in comparison with 623,503 in 2010 or 3,361,212 in 2008. Today, 24.2 per cent of Spanish households have pay-TV either through satellite, cable or IPTV, according to CMT.
Eight out of ten homes say that the main reason for not having a pay TV service is that the free-to-air TV offer is enough and pay-TV is too expensive.