Advanced Television

W Europe to reach 65m SVoD subs

September 21, 2017

Western European SVoD revenues will increase to $6.5 billion (€5.46bn) by 2022, up from $2.8 billion in 2016. SVoD became the region’s largest OTT revenue source in 2016 by overtaking AVoD. SVoD’s share of OTT revenues will continue to grow, according to the Western Europe OTT TV & Video Forecasts report from Digital TV Research.

OTT TV episode and movie revenues for 18 Western European countries will reach $14.65 billion in 2022; more than double the $6.90 billion recorded in 2016. Revenues are expected to climb by $1.69 billion in 2017 alone.

Digital TV Research forecasts 65.07 million SVoD subscribers by 2022, up from 33.96 million by end-2016. About 10.69 million subscribers were added in 2017.

“These are gross SVoD subscriptions where one household can pay for more than one platform,” explained Simon Murray, Principal Analyst at Digital TV Research. “Multiple SVoD subscriptions are already popular in Scandinavia and the UK.”

“However, SVoD subscriber growth will be much more modest in countries such as France, Italy and Spain,” he continued. “In fact, Sweden will have more SVoD subscribers than Spain in 2022, despite only having a quarter of the population.”

By 2022, 37.1 per cent of Western European TV households will subscribe to an SVoD platform; up from 19.7 per cent at end-2016. This means that Germany, Italy, France and Spain will all still be under the regional average by 2022.

“SVoD penetration is higher the further North that you travel. This has nothing to do with the weather or beer-drinking countries versus wine-drinking ones,” stressed Murray. “Penetration will be particularly high in the Scandinavian countries, which have high pay-TV, broadband and smartphone penetration. There are also plenty of platforms on offer.”

Netflix will remain the largest pan-regional SVoD platform by some distance, with an expected 29.61 million paying subscribers in 2022 – or 46 per cent of the region’s total (down from a 55 per cent share in 2016). Amazon Prime Video will be the second largest platform by 2022, with 15 million paying subscribers.

Categories: Articles, Broadcast, Markets, Pay TV, Premium, Research, VOD