Africa Pay TV revenue to reach $6 billion in 2021

Monday, March 13th, 2017
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According to the latest data by Dataxis for the year ending 2016, Africa Pay TV subscribers stand at approximately 18.7 million subscribers which represent an increase of approximately 2 million subscribers compared to the previous year. Out of the 18.7 million subscribers, 14 million are DTH subscribers and the remaining represent mostly pay DTT with limited cable and IPTV deployments.

Africa pay TV Revenues Forecast

Dataxis estimates pay TV revenue for the year 2016 to stand at $ 4.4 billion and forecast to reach $ 6 billion by 2021. The key players for the Sub Saharan African region are Naspers (approx. 56%), Canal+( approx.15%) and StarTimes (approx.9%).

“The satellite operator MultiChoice, owned by Naspers Limited has been the key player in Anglophone Africa pay TV market since its launch. However, the new entrant of the year, Econet Media/ Kwesé along with in particular further deployments by StarTimes will change this configuration”, declared Pascal Orhan, Chief Analyst at Dataxis.

Regarding the digital terrestrial TV migration process, the full transition is still far from completed. One of the main issue is distribution of millions of DTT Set-top-boxes to low income households, with industrial policies associated that are leading to further delays. Dataxis predict that the DTT process should be completed in the Sub Saharan African by 2021.

Dataxis research team launched a new product call the TV tracker for Sub Saharan Africa. The service provides quarterly reporting of the pay and FTA distribution statistics for all TV channels active in SSA and is segmented by country, group owner, genre, pay, FTA, HD, SD. More than 1000 channels has been analysed and 25% of the channels are generalists, 19% are movies and fictions and 9% represent sport channels.

“Pay TV operators like Naspers, Canal+ and StarTimes play an important role in the channel edition as 18% of all the channels belong to one of them. They focus mainly on movies and fictions and sports as the two genres account for almost three quarter of all the channels they edit”, added Pascal Orhan.

All these forecast results will be debated at NexTV CEO Africa 2017 on 10th, 11th and 12th May 2017 at the Hilton Resort in Mauritius which is organized by Dataxis. The objective of the 2-day event is to focus on the changing trends of TV/Telco business and new platforms/services in Africa. The conference will bring together more than 100 CEOs and high profile speakers of TV and Telco Business in Africa.