Portuguese TV adds 349,000 new daily viewers
January 6, 2021
From Branislav Pekic in Rome
The number of daily TV viewers in Portugal increased by 349,000 in 2020, taking the total number of viewers to 2.3 million.
According to daily Diário de Notícias, of the total 196,000 relate to new pay-TV viewers (+123,000 year-on-year) and streaming content users (+73,000).
The growth is obviously largely due to the Covid-19 pandemic, which, much like the rest of Europe, forced the Portuguese to spend much more time at home.
The audience of FTA broadcasters RTP, SIC and TVI grew by 15.6 per cent, with an extra 153,000 viewers per day, and taking the total to 1.39 million.
However, the audience growth was not enough to reverse the negative trend from pre-coronavirus times, which has seen FTA channels losing around 1 per cent of market share in 2020 (to 50.2 per cent).
In audience terms, SIC ended the year as leader with a 20.2 per cent share, ahead of TV (15.2 per cent) and RTP1 (12 per cent).
Pay-TV channels, which were present in 90 per cent of households, saw a small drop of 0.3 per cent. However, streaming platforms like HBO and Netflix, as well as games, registered a growth of 31.7 per cent in the last 12 months, with an average of 303,600 daily entries.
Meanwhile, the Portuguese Association of Media Agencies estimates that the annual decrease in TV advertising amounts to around 17 per cent.