Nine in 10 Portuguese homes subscribe to pay TV services

Almost the eternity of Portugal subscribes to a pay TV service, according to the country’s communications regulator Autoridade Nacional de Comunicações (ANACOM).

A new report from the regulator found that, in Q3 2020, nine out of every 10 households were receiving TV via a subscription. This represents a growth of 3.6% year-over-year.

The number of subscribers to the TV signal distribution service reached 4.2 million, 167,000 more (4.1%) than in the same quarter of the previous year. This is the largest annual growth recorded since the end of 2015.

ANACOM attributes much of this growth to offers based on FTTH, which grew by 270,000 year-over-year to reach 2.1 million subscribers – an increase of 14.6%. This growth was down to a combination of new customers and the transfer of existing customers to the more efficient FTTH tech.

FTTH has been the main form of pay TV distribution since 2018, and surpassed the threshold of 50% of total subscribers in Q3 2020. FTTH is now at 50.3% of the market, followed by cable (31.5%), DTH (10.8%) and ADSL (7.4%).

In terms of operators, MEO was the market leader with 39.9% of the market, a year-over-year increase of 0.4%. This is only marginally more than NOS, which shrunk by 1% to 39.4% of the market. Vodafone is clearly in third, with 17% of the TV signal distribution share, while NOWO is a distant fourth with 3.6%.