Cable, DTH drive Chile's growing pay-TV market


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Juan Fernandez Gonzalez

| 15 January 2016




Direct-to-home (DTH) and cable platforms are performing well in the growing Chilean pay-TV market, which nears three million households.



The Q3 2015 figures published by the country's telecom authority Subtel show that the sector grew by 5.5% at the end of third quarter. The 2.9 million-plus subscriptions drove penetration to exceed 53%.

Since penetrations rates neared 50% homes two years ago, satellite and cable have been growing at the same pace, and both share the market nearly equally. Still, DTH platforms slightly dominate the industry with 1.5 million subs and a 51.3% share.

Regarding the four dominant operators, only Claro has lost subscribers in Q3 2015while the other three gained them. The market's leader, VTR, has a subscriber base of over a million accesses and a 35% market share (which continues to shrink as the market size grows), followed by Movistar (630,000 subs and a 21.6% share), DirecTV (513,00 and 17.5%) and Claro (444,000 and 15.2%).