Latin Americas Pay TV Market Showing Steady Growth as Aso Approaches, Reveals New Report

Digital TV has begun to take off in Latin America, with penetration increasing from about 18% of TV households at in 2010 to about 45% by mid-2014. This is expected to reach about 95% by 2020. DTTV will account for about half of digital TV home net additions to 2020.

In several markets in the region the 2014 FIFA World Cup was a catalyst for the rollout and customer take-up of digital TV services. A further stimulant is expected from the 2016 Olympic Games, also to be held in Brazil. The reallocation of frequencies released from analogue broadcasting has expedited the roll out of mobile broadband via LTE technologies.

Consistent growth in the pay TV sector in the region has been supported by competition among players. There are now about 68 million pay TV subscribers, showing an annual growth of about 11%. The biggest markets continue to be Brazil, Mexico and Argentina, in line with those countries' large population. Together these markets account for about two-thirds of the region's pay TV sector by subscribers.

By mid-2014 the satellite TV sector had marginally overtaken cable TV for the first time, with both sectors having around 31 million subscribers. The popularity of satellite TV has been fostered by a growing number of operators in the market, and by the promotion of low cost plans. New players in Central America alone include Qualy TV in Costa Rica, Guatemala and Nicaragua, Viva in the Dominican Republic and Cable & Wireless in Panama.

Capacity will be enhanced further into 2016 with the launch of a new Ku and Ka band satellite by Hispasat. This will complete the operator's Latin American coverage.

In addition, customers are attracted to the HD format, which has encouraged providers to distribute a greater number of channels in HD. The regional broadcaster DirecTV, in the process of being acquired by AT&T, reported a 43% increase in the number of HD subscribers in the year to march 2014. In all there were some 13 million HD subscribers by the end of 2013, compared to eight million in 2012 and four million in 2011.

The IPTV and MMDS sectors are far behind, though IPTV is showing solid growth as copper networks are upgraded. There is potential to deliver IPTV over fibre networks, though as yet the latter are largely limited to certain areas of the major cities and the region has yet to develop a wide-scale fibre market.

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