Total TV market revenues in Western Europe amounted to €100.3 billion in 2018, up 2 per cent year-on-year, according to the Turning Digital report from Rome-based ITMedia Consulting.

Even with an average inflation rate of 1.6 per cent in 2018, there was a limited positive growth also in real terms.

The decline in demand for traditional entertainment services has resulted in a shift of players to online, increasing the supply of content to meet a growing demand for video streaming services.

Despite increased preference for content on-demand and in multiscreen mode, pay-TV still accounts for the largest part of TV income, reaching €48.3 billion and growing by 4.3 per cent, at a higher rate than in the last five years.

European pay-TV operators are responding to the proliferation of subscription services in a variety of ways, diversifying their product and service offerings, launching lower priced offerings, bundling with broadband services, integrating non-linear services with linear channels on their platforms.

TV advertising remained stagnant at €30.6 billion (+0.4 per cent), distributed unevenly across countries, resulting in a widening of the gap of market shares of pay-TV and TV advertising.

Increased competition with global players (mainly Amazon and Netflix) has led to the creation of a mix of services focused on the “smart home” in which an increasing number of players operate (telco, TV, OTT). Also, broadcasters are also increasingly moving away from a model of pure content acquisition, focusing on original productions or co-productions directly for their online platforms.

Today 60 per cent of mobile consumption is video and it will grow fivefold in the next four or five years. That is what is driving mobile broadband and fiber deployment.

The arrival of 5G is accelerating the transformation of the TV sector, with many ways of offering TV on a variety of devices and platforms on which video content can circulate, be consumed and shared.

Categories: Articles, Markets, Pay TV, Research