CEE drives 8.8% satellite growth across EMEA

CEE drives 8.8% satellite growth across EMEA

By Julian Clover
Published: September 15, 2010 11.23 Europe/London

Eutelsat has released details of its 2010 reception survey that reports a total of 210.7 million homes in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. The 8.8% growth has been driven by satellite reception, which itself has expanded at a rate twice faster than that of multichannel reception as a whole, rising 16% to 129.3 million homes.

Eutelsat has cemented its own position on the market, the number of homes receiving television from a Eutelsat satellite breaking the 200 million barrier for the first time at 204 million.
Central & East Europe showed particular growth, the number of homes receiving cable and satellite services increasing by 16.7%. The percentage of homes in the region that are cable and satellite households stands at 50.9%, up from 43.6% in 2008. The 58.9% of western TV homes with cable or satellite connections remained relatively stable.

Satellite reception has progressed over the two years by 16% from 111.5 million homes in 2008, while cable penetration decreased by 1.8% to 85.2 million homes from 86.8 million in 2008.

In addition to satellite it is IPTV that has eaten into the cable total. IPTV homes have grown by 25.6% to 11.3 million, up from 9 million. This increase was at the expense of cable homes (which decreased by 1.8%) and also of terrestrial TV homes (which decreased by 8.7% to 138.5 million from 151.7 million) despite DTT deployment in Western European countries.

Satellite pay-TV grew by 22.7% and again it is Central & East Europe leading the charge with a massive 63.5% increase that takes the total in the region to 17.5 million.

Poland’s satellite pay-TV market, which expanded to 6.1 million homes from 4.7 million, represents 34.8% of homes in Central and Eastern Europe. The Russian satellite pay-TV market more than doubled, from two million homes in 2008 to 4.7 million in 2010, representing 26.8% of the satellite pay-TV market in the region.

In total of the 129.3 million satellite homes, 51.4 million (39.7%) subscribe to digital pay-TV, up from 41.9 million in 2008.