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Global Pay-TV Market Growing to $353 Billion by 2015

Infonetics Research released excerpts from their "Pay-TV Services and Subscribers" report, which forecasts and analyzes the telco Internet protocol television (IPTV), cable video, and satellite video services markets.

Back in 2008, cable video made up 59 percent of the global pay-TV market, satellite video brought in 38 percent and IPTV was a much smaller piece of the total addressable video entertainment marketplace.

Today, cable operators are being challenged not only by attractive pricing and services from IPTV and satellite operators, but by all over-the-top (OTT) video service providers -- such as Netflix and Amazon On-Demand -- which are prompting some consumers to disconnect traditional services.

Based on the study findings, there should be no doubt that the global pay-TV market is in a period of transition. Net new cable video subscribers continue to decline in North America and EMEA, and the small increases in Asia and Central and Latin America are not offsetting those subscriber losses.

"While we don't expect OTT to have a significant impact on pay-TV subscribers because operators are responding to OTT with their own enhanced delivery offerings, we do expect cable video's share of pay-TV revenue to decline as satellite video increases -- nearly catching up to cable by 2015 -- while IPTV services grow to 15 percent of the market," notes Jeff Heynen, directing analyst for broadband access and video at Infonetics Research.

Infonetics latest market study highlights include:
  • The global pay-TV market, including telco IPTV, cable and satellite video services, totaled $125 billion in the first half of 2011 (1H11) and is forecast by Infonetics Research to grow to $353 billion by 2015.
  • Most of the future growth in the pay-TV market will come from satellite video and telco IPTV services.
  • North America remains the highest-value pay-TV market, benefitting from the highest average revenue per user (ARPU), followed by Asia-Pacific, which benefits from a pay-TV subscriber base nearly 4 times the size of that of North America.
  • DirecTV and Comcast are the global market leaders for pay-TV service revenue and subscribers in 1H11, respectively, with DirecTV continuing to enjoy the highest ARPU in the industry and Comcast now with 22.5 million subscribers.
  • In the first half of 2011 (1H11), the top 20 pay TV revenue leaders accounted for 52 percent of the revenue, while the top 20 subscriber leaders represented just 29 percent of the subscribers.

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