North American pay-TV revenues peaked at $102.86 billion in 2013, according to a new forecast from Digital TV Research. Revenues will drop 11.7 percent ($12.04 billion) from 2014-2020, coming in at $90.71 billion in 2020, according to the researchers.
Cable revenues across Canada and the U.S. will fall $12.98 billion over the course of the decade, according to Digital TV Research. Expected losses from analog cable will total $3.66 billion while digital cable revenue losses will total $9.32 billion over the period.
Satellite TV revenues across North America will drop a further $1.23 billion. IPTV revenues will rise $2.17 billion, however, according to Digital TV Research’s latest “Digital TV North America Forecasts” report.
Pay TV Revenues
Cable TV subscriptions across North America totaled 67.8 million as of end-2010. Of those, 17.5 million were analog. That will fall to 56.6 million by 2020, Digital TV Research forecasts.
Satellite pay-TV subscriptions will rise and overtake cable subscriptions “to become the largest pay-TV platform earner in 2019,” according to the market research provider. Satellite TV revenues will fall $1.2 billion by 2020 to total $40.69 billion.
“Although there has been a recent slowdown in subscriber growth, the number of homes paying for IPTV will climb by 23% between 2014 and 2020 to reach 18.05 million – or to 13.5% of TV households,” Digital TV Research comments in its news release.
Total North American pay-TV subscriptions will hold steady at 110 million, though pay-TV penetration will decline from 2010’s 86.7 percent to 82.6 percent by 2020 given an increase in the number of TV households across the continent. “The homes not paying for TV services,” meanwhile, “will increase from 18.9 million in 2010 to 26.3 million in 2020,” the market research company says.
OTT will paint a much brighter picture, according to Digital TV Research, which forecasts that OTT revenues will reach $10.39 billion in 2020, up from $6.85 billion in 2014 and $2.02 billion in 2010. These figure do not include advertising revenues for the OTT players.
SVOD subscriber numbers will reach 66.85 million in 2020, researchers said. That would be up from 50.62 million in 2014 and 16.68 million in 2010. Meanwhile, “SVOD revenues will reach $6.91 billion in 2020, up by $2 billion on 2014,” according to Digital TV Research.
Download-to-own revenues, for their part, will nearly double over the period, rising to reach $2.47 billion, accompanied by strong growth in rental revenues ($1.10 billion in 2020).
