“In 2014, the total number of subscribers to paid audiovisual program retransmission services increased by 5.9% to 6.9 million compared with 6.5 million at the end of 2013. As a result of this growth, the household penetration rate reached 92%,” ANCOM says.
If the TV service market grew by 380,000 subscriptions in 2014, what companies gained market share?
A clear winner is Orange, the leader of the mobile telephony market, which ended 2014 with 157,000 contracts. The company, which expanded into TV service market in mid 2013 did not reveal the number of subscriptions in December 2013, so its growth rate cannot be calculated. One can only estimate the number of users gained in 2014.
Telekom posted growth too (60,987 subscriptions), but was unable to beat the market average and stopped at 4.5%. UPC, the second largest cable TV provider on the market, stagnated on this segment. This suggests market leader RCS&RDS, which had more than 3.3 million subscribers in June 2013, according to the latest data supplied by the operator, accounted for most of the growth.
RCS&RDS did not return ZF’s calls for comment on the trend of the customer base. It should be noted by RCS&RDS continued to aggressively acquire small rivals in 2014, therefore adding tens of thousands of new customers.
According to ANCOM, most subscribers are cable TV subscribers, 4.38 million at the end of 2014 (up 6.3% on 2013), while 2.46 million are direct-to-home TV service subscribers (up 4.7% on 2013) and 68,000 are IP TV subscribers (22.1% more than in 2013). The IPTV growth might be largely because of Telekom, which promoted such services quite heavily. Telekom group does not publish a breakdown by technology (cable, DTH, IPTV) for its TV subscriptions and did not provide such data to ZF, either.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)