Digital TV Homes to Double in Eastern Europe

London, UK, May 15, 2013--Rapid conversion means that the number of digital homes in Eastern Europe will  nearly double between 2012 and 2018, bringing the total to 121 million, according  to a new report from Digital TV Research. In fact, the Digital TV Eastern Europe report estimates that 13 million digital TV homes will be added in 2013 alone. 

Digital TV penetration crossed the halfway mark of TV households in 2012, up from  only 20% at end-2008. Fast take-up (and analog terrestrial switch-off) will push  digital TV penetration to 61.4% by end-2013 and onto 97.3% by 2018. Ten of the  21 countries covered in this report will be completely digital by 2018, with Estonia  the first to full conversion – in 2012.

The number of analog terrestrial TV households fell by 30 million between 2008  and 2012, leaving 37.2 million. However, only 13 million DTT homes were added,  therefore the digital pay TV platforms benefitted from the analog terrestrial homes  converting to digital. With nearly all of the analog terrestrial TV homes  disappearing, there will be 43.3 million DTT homes (or about a third of the TV  households) by 2018. 

Simon Murray, Principal Analyst at Digital TV Research: “Much of the emphasis  has fallen on the remaining 21.7 million analog cable subscribers. Many of these  homes will upgrade to digital cable, but some will shift to IPTV and DTH. However,  many of the remaining analog cable subscribers are refuseniks, who don’t want to  pay more for TV services. Free-to-air DTT (or even pay DTT) is an attractive option  for these homes.”

Murray continued: “Slow implementation of analog terrestrial switchover favored  the pay TV operators as it gave them more time to convert homes to their packages  before FTA DTT became established. Poland and Romania are prime examples of  this. However, we expect the impact of DTT in these two countries to result in  (small) declines in their pay TV subscriber counts.”

Pay TV revenues in Eastern Europe will be 31% higher in 2018 (US$7,544 million)  than in 2012 (US$5,759 million). The number of pay TV subs will climb by 21%  over the same period; demonstrating higher ARPU from digital subs than analog  ones. DTH will overtake cable as the most lucrative platform in 2017. IPTV  revenues will more than double between 2012 and 2018. Russia will contribute US$2.2 billion of the 2018 pay TV revenues in 2018, and will  be responsible for US$1 billion of the region’s US$1.8 billion additional pay TV 
revenues between 2012 and 2018.

At the other end of the scale, five countries (Hungary, Montenegro, Poland,  Slovakia and Slovenia) will experience almost flat pay TV revenues. Much of this is due to subscriber conversion to double-play and triple-play packages (where TV  receives a lower proportion of the ARPU than for standalone subs) and greater  competition.