The worldwide pay-TV market continues to grow, with a subscriber base that is expected to increase to nearly 1.1 billion by 2019, generating $323 billion, according to research from ABI Research.
In 2014 alone it will surpass 920 million subscribers, the firm said, generating more than $269 billion. Also in the good-news column, while pay-TV's average revenue per user (ARPU) is expected to drop slightly due to increasing price competition, ABI expects that it will happen at a lower rate compared to the ARPU drop in 2013.
"The growing number of HD subscribers, as well as major sporting events such as the World Cup 2014, have contributed to improving ARPU," said Jake Saunders, vice president and practice director of core forecasting for ABI, and author of the report.
Some trends stood out, like notable subscriber growth in Latin America, which the firm said was mainly driven by the World Cup 2014 matches. Notably, US satellite TV operator DirecTV added 543,000 subscribers in the second quarter in the region — a sharp increase compared to subscriber net additions of 165,000 in the same quarter of 2013. ARPU in local currency also increased 8% from a year earlier.
It should be noted that during Q3 2014, the effect of Brazil's World Cup and the eruption of new players and technologies has diminished, according to Business Bureau analysts Verónica Bianchini and Santiago Zapata, in the company's quarterly pay-TV report.
ABI also noted that the IPTV market share meanwhile grew more than 1% point in the second quarter of this year compared to 2013, driving competition. In Japan, satellite TV operator Sky Perfect lost more than 200,000 subscribers over the past year due to increasing competition from alternative pay-TV platforms, ABI found.
Multiscreen services are helping operators to reduce churn and boost revenue, however.
"To counter churn and maintain service revenue, SKY Perfect has developed video-on-demand (VOD) services which allows customers to access video content from multiple devices including smartphones, tablets, etc," ABI said.
SKY Perfect encouraged 126,000 of its customers to subscribe to VOD services at the end of 1Q 2014.
