Nearly 846m pay-TV subscribers in 2014

The growth of pay TV services is driven by three major factors, said ABI: the ongoing digital transition and a parallel rise in demand for premium content, new operators and offers, and new features such as interactivity, video on demand (VOD), and personal video recording (PVR).

Industry analyst Michael Inouye said: “Cable will remain the largest pay TV platform, satellite the second-largest and telco TV the smallest (DTT aside), but the latter will show the fastest growth, more than doubling its share by 2014, albeit starting from a much smaller base. Most of the subscribers captured by telco TV will be lured away from cable services.

“Interactivity is a feature mainly found in mature markets. It’s a way to try and keep subscribers who have other options.

“While one might expect advanced services of this kind to spread gradually from these mature markets to developing ones, the relatively low per-subscriber revenue available in some countries like China and India may prove to be a hurdle to the expansion of additional features/services.”

In January, a report from Futuresource Consulting said that by 2013, revenues from video-on-demand movies will reach $2.4 billion in the USA and €430 million in the leading five Western European countries.