Advanced Television

Analyst: E Europe to add 17m digital pay-TV subs

March 19, 2018

The number of digital pay-TV subscribers in Eastern Europe will increase from 25.49 million in 2010 to 61.57 million in 2017 and onto 78.08 million by 2023. The Eastern Europe Pay TV Forecasts report from Digital TV Research states that digital pay-TV subs will climb by 27 per cent between 2017 and 2023.

“Eastern Europe is slowly ridding itself of the legacy of analogue cable TV,” advises Simon Murray, Principal Analyst at Digital TV Research. “Twenty million households still subscribed to analogue cable at end-2017 – more than digital cable. Many of these homes receive very basic packages; often as part of their rent. Some of the remaining analogue cable subs do not want to convert to more expensive digital pay-TV platforms and will therefore switch to DTT.”

Russia will account for half of the region’s pay-TV subscribers in 2023. However, Russia will lose 1.5 million pay-TV subscribers between 2017 and 2023. The number of pay-TV subs will fall in 10 of the 22 countries covered in the report between 2017 and 2023.

Pay-TV revenues in Eastern Europe peaked at $6.53 billion(€5.32bn) in 2017 and will slowly fall to $6.33 billion by 2023. Analogue cable revenues will drop by $1 billion over this period, so digital pay-TV revenues will increase by $769 million to $6.25 billion.

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