Pay TV continues to grow, despite recession

Pay TV is continuing to grow in Europe in spite of the recession, with the 20 leading European private TV companies up 1.9% overall.

The European Audiovisual Observatory announced the news at the beginning of this year’s MIP-TV event, revealing that pay TV performs better than advert financed TV, with main private European groups reaching combined consolidated revenues just short of £30 million in 2012.

Pay TV revenues were up 3.7%, whilst advert financed TVs down -1%.

Of these, German TV groups performed best in terms of year on year (YoY) percentage growth, with Sky Deutschland AG experiencing a YoY revenue growth of 17.1% (£1.1million) followed by Kabel Deutschland, up 8.3% (£1.5 million) and ProSiebenSat.1 Media AG seeing a 7.7% increase in revenue (£2.5 million).

However UK TV and broadband company BskyB came out on top overall, with a 5.4% growth that took its yearly consolidated revenue to almost £7 million. US company Liberty Global followed, up 6.3% to just short of £8 million, and overall, US groups performed better than EU groups with a higher organic growth rate of 2.9%.

ITV experienced a small growth in the European market, up 2.6%, an increase of £2.2 million.

The report also showed that in spite of the -0.3% negative growth of the EU’s GDP in 2012, people are still continuing to invest in new services, including transactional VOD.