Recession pegs back Brazil’s pay-TV sector


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Juan Fernandez Gonzalez

| 31 March 2016




Both official figures and external reports indicate that Brazil’s pay-TV market is continuing to decline, dropping around half a million subs during 2015.



television digitalFirst highlighted by the country’s telecom authority, Anatel, the consultancy firm Dataxis has now confirmed the fact that Brazil’s pay-TV market is no longer stagnating, but declining.

According to the Dataxis report, published through NexTV, at the end of Q4 2015, 19.12 million pay-TV households were registered - a fall of 460,130 subscriptions (2.4%) since the beginning of the year. Direct-to-home (DTH) platforms registered the largest drop.

Dataxis believes that the decline of the sector is the result of both the political and economic crisis affecting the country and the “failure to develop prepaid DTH services, which could function as a strategy to stop customer churn”.

Despite the decline of DTH, satellite still accounts for 58.4% of total pay-TV homes. América Móvil’s Net retains the market lead with a 37.5% share, according to the report, followed by AT&T’s SKY (28.5%), América Móvil’s Claro TV (14.3%), Oi (6.2%) and Telefónica’s GVT (5.2%) and Vivo (4.1%) operations.