Pay TV ARPU at record high levels in the Nordics

Wednesday, June 3rd, 2020
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Overview of the Nordic Pay-TV and OTT market

Dataxis latest research revealed In the five Nordic markets, almost every household is accessing TV through paid subscriptions. In most of those countries, free-to-air reception only grants access to the few public channels available, pushing viewers to subscribe to paying services. Sweden, Denmark and Finland still have a significant proportion of households able to access TV through indirect cable subscriptions contracted in their buildings.

Pay TV subscriptions in the Nordics by access

This explains why the Pay-TV average revenue per user is reaching record high levels in this area. Direct cable, terrestrial and satellite Pay-TV subscribers are generating an ARPU around 40€, which is far ahead of other countries in Central and Western Europe. In all Nordic markets, IPTV and OTT offers providing linear TV content are now accounting for the majority of Pay-TV subscriptions, keeping in mind that households may subscribe to several OTT services at the same time and also use them along traditional Pay TV services.

This chart shows that OTT Pay-TV services have a significant weight in Finland when compared to the rest of this region. This can be explained by the long term existence of well developed TV channel packages in local OTT offers. It is the case of two national actors, Ruutu and Elisa Viihde, as well as the well implanted regional actors DPlay and C More. The existence of several services and the dispersion of content among those could also explain the high level of subscriptions since households may subscribe to several offers to get access to a wider range of channels. Compared to its neighbours, Finland also has a lower penetration of fixed broadband but a very high level of mobile connections, which is more favorable to the development of OTT services since those grant consumers a more flexible access.

Nordic viewers are far ahead of their European counterparts when it comes to streaming services consumption and access to OTT Pay-TV offers. There are now more streaming services subscriptions than households in the area, which means many households are equipped with more than one service. According to Nordics than in the rest our estimations, OTT Pay-TV services are five times more developed in the of Europe.