In Brazil’s plummeting pay-TV market, fibre-based options are the only winners, seeing nearly 20% growth over the last six months.
Although slowly stabilising after almost two years of decline, Brazil’s pay-TV continues to lose ground compared with other Latin American markets. According to the latest figures from the country’s telecom authority, Anatel, the market lost over 40,000 subscribers in October, representing 0.2% of the total.
Despite the small falls - which, according to Anatel, point to a more stable scenario - the reality is that Brazil’s pay-TV industry has over one million less subscribers than at the beginning of 2015, when it neared the 20 million subscriber mark.
In this challenging market, IPTV options have managed to find some room to grow. Although still residual compared with satellite and cable options, IPTV has seen 18.6% growth during the past six months. Fibre-based subscriptions have increased from 182,000 to over 216,000 in October.
In fact, pay-TV operators offering an IPTV option, such as Telefónica’s Vivo, have withstood the market’s crisis better than their competitors.
Still, IPTV represents just 1.14% of a market led by satellite operators (57.44% of the total subscriptions) and cable (41.38%).
Out of the 18.94 million subscriptions, América Móvil’s brands Claro, Embratel and Net control almost 9.9 million, ahead of AT&T’s Sky with 5.31 million and Telefónica with 1.75 million.
