PwC: LatAm pay-TV to grow 10% a year
August 9, 2013
Global pay-TV is expected to grow consistently over the next five years, with Latin America’s growth rates set to rise above the global average in the period to 9-10 per cent CAGR, says Marcel Fenez, global leader of PwC Entertainment & Media and chairman of Asian pay-TV organization CASBAA.
He told the Brazilian pay-TV association conference ABTA 2013 that the segment is expected to expand at 3.6 per cent CAGR globally in the same period.
Participating in the “New scenarios for content monetization” panel, the analyst said: “We are still seeing good growth from pay TV across the globe, although the rate is slowing. Although the proportion of OTT revenue is increasing, interestingly enough it will still only make up six per cent of total pay TV revenues by 2017. So we definitely shouldn’t write off pay TV, at least not in the next five years”.
According to Fenez, traditional TV players are increasingly embracing multi screen/TV everywhere and on-demand services as a way to increase ARPU and loyalty among premium subscribers. He says content acquisition is key for online success. “Netflix has been keen to invest significantly in content acquisition.”
Talking about adding services to retain pay-TV customers, Gustavo Ramos, new media director at Brazil’s main pay TV content and programming company, Globosat said: “We continue along this path of adding free VoD content to paid TV content to retain our customers. We are still not making money from it, but this is not a concern now. In a 28bn-real (US$12.1bn) business like ours, present in 18 million households, adding complementary packages to maintain customer loyalty is more important.”