Eastern Europe to add 17MN digital pay-TV subs over next five years
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Editor
| 19 March 2018

As the region rids itself of the legacy of analogue cable TV, the Eastern Europe digital pay-TV market is growing at a fair clip, says Digital TV Research, and is projected to grow from 61.57 million subscribers in 2017 to 78.08 million by 2023.

This, the Eastern Europe Pay TV Forecasts report calculates, represents a growth rate of 27%. Russia is set to account for half of the region’s pay-TV subscribers in 2023, even though the country’s market is also predicted to lose 1.5 million pay-TV subscribers between 2017 and 2023. In all, Digital TV Research predicts that the number of pay-TV subs will fall in ten of the 22 countries covered in the report between 2017 and 2023.

The report adds that pay-TV revenues in Eastern Europe peaked at $6.53 billion in 2017 and will slowly fall to $6.33 billion by 2023. Digital TV Research expects analogue cable revenues to drop by $1 billion over this period, while digital pay-TV revenues increase by $769 million to $6.25 billion during the same time.

“Twenty million households still subscribed to analogue cable at end-2017 – more than digital cable,” said report author and Digital TV Research principal analyst Simon Murray. “Many of these homes receive very basic packages; often as part of their rent. Some of the remaining analogue cable subs do not want to convert to more expensive digital pay-TV platforms and will therefore switch to DTT.”