Pay TV subscriptions in Portugal up 136,000 in 2022

Anacom: Around 61% of TV subscribers have taken up fibre optics

By the end of 2022, 96.4% of households had a pay-TV signal distribution service, an increase of 2.7 percentage points (p.p.) compared to the previous year.

There were 4.5 million subscribers to the pay-TV signal distribution service, 136 thousand (+3.1%) more than in the previous year.

Growth was driven by fibre-optic (FTTH) services, which added 258,000 subscribers (+10.4%) to reach 2.7 million subscribers. This growth was not only due to the addition of new customers, but also to the migration of customers previously served by other networks to FTTH.

Since 2018, FTTH has been the main form of access to this service. By the end of 2022, FTTH represented 60.8% of total subscribers, followed by cable TV (28.1%), satellite TV – DTH (8.0%) and ADSL (3.0%).

By the end of 2022, the number of residential pay-TV subscribers reached 4.0 million, 113 thousand (+2.9%) more than in the previous year, and represented 89.1% of the total.

The number of non-residential subscribers reached 490 thousand (10.9% of the total), an increase by 4.8% compared to the previous year.

By the end of 2022, MEO was the provider with the highest share of Pay TV subscribers (41.1%), followed by the NOS Group (37.0%), Vodafone (18.8%) and NOWO (2.9%). Vodafone and MEO were the providers which, in net terms, attracted more subscribers than the previous year, with their shares increasing by 0.6 p.p. and 0.5 p.p., respectively. On the other hand, the NOS Group’s (-0.8 p.p.) and NOWO’s (-0.3 p.p.) shares decreased.

In the residential segment, MEO had the highest share (39.5%), followed by the NOS Group (38.1%), Vodafone (19.0%) and NOWO (3.2%). Vodafone and MEO’s shares increased (+0.5 p.p. and +0.4 p.p., respectively), while the NOS Group and NOWO’s shares decreased (-0.7 p.p. and -0.3 p.p., respectively).