Worldwide Pay TV To Gain Subscribers, Revenues Remain Flat

Pay TV providers  -- cable, satellite, and telco -- will continue to add new subscribers in the coming years, but revenue growth will be stagnant.

Digital TV Research expects global pay-TV subscriptions for the 522 operators to increase to 963 million by 2022 from 839 million in 2016 -- adding 120 million subs.

Revenues will remain flat, with a total of $185 billion by 2022. In addition, the top 10 pay TV operators will lose revenue share -- to 51% (as of 2016) from 55% by 2022. Many analysts believe new digital TV services offering up cheaper “skinny” bundles of TV networks will slow down -- or worse -- have declining revenues.

The fastest-growing region will be in Asia-Pacific -- only 93 of 522 pay TV operators there will lose subscribers in the next six years. Last year, China Radio & TV became the world’s largest pay-TV operator with 227 million subscribers.

In the U.S., the researcher expects AT&T -- the biggest U.S. pay TV operator -- to slip to 29.47 million subscribers for all its businesses from 30.73 million; Comcast will drop to 17.47 million from 21.73 million; Charter, down to 14.15 million from 16.31 million; and Dish Network, to 13.1 million from 13.61 million.

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