According to a new report by Screen Digest, growth prospects for European pay TV operators are looking positive and are more sustainable than they were during the boom years of the late 1990s.
Growth in the number of European pay TV subscribers has seen a steady decline since the launch of Europe’s first digital TV platforms between 1996 and 1998. But now, for the first time since then, the industry has experienced a rapid acceleration in growth and is now on course to record an increase of 2.6m net subscriptions by the end of 2004, compared with 1.3m in 2003.
Screen Digest predicts that, by 2008, there will be 94.4m pay TV households in Europe, compared to 82.4m at the end of 2003, an increase of 13%.
In addition, the increasing availability of cheap set-top boxes and renewed investment from cable operators is once again driving the migration from analogue to digital subscriptions. Digital homes are forecast to grow from just under one third of the pay TV total at the end of 2003 to 58% in 2008. Much of this growth will be driven by the cable sector – currently just six per cent of Europe’s cable homes are digital, but 36 per cent will have been converted by 2008.
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