LATAM pay-TV to near full digitalisation by 2022
Details
Juan Fernandez Gonzalez
| 27 June 2017

A Dataxis report has revealed that digital pay-TV has already reached 85% of total TV subscribers in Latin America and is expected to hit 94% by 2022.

According to Dataxis the growth is driven by the progress of direct-to-home (DTH), a 100% digital technology currently used by 50.8% of total subscribers in Latin America, and forecast to reach 51.5% in 2022.

In addition, cable TV subscribers are increasingly choosing digital options. By the end of last year, digital cable reached 68% of all cable subscribers and is forecast to reach 85% in 2022.

Other fully digital options such as IPTV are being developed at a steady pace. Across the region, already 2% of pay-TV subscribers used this technology in 2016 and Dataxis expects it will be at 6% in 2022 with a subscriber base that will be multiplied by three. According to the report, marginal distribution technologies such as analogue MMDS and UHF terrestrial TV will disappear over the next years.

The report also highlights the unequal digitalisation throughout the region. Countries like Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Peru and Panama would already have reached 90% digital subscribers in 2016, while Argentina, Bolivia, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua have a digital pay-TV penetration rate below 60%.