Satellite TV ‘will overtake’ cable in 2015

Global satellite TV revenues will overtake total cable TV revenues in 2015, according to new research by Digital TV Research.

The forecast, which covers 138 countries, claims that pay satellite TV revenues will reach US$90.02 billion this year, compared to US$89.01 billion for cable TV – of which US$79.19 billion will come from digital cable and US$9.82 billion from analogue.

In 2014, the breakdown was pay satellite revenues of US$88.36 billion and total cable revenues of US$91.99 billion.

“Global cable TV revenues peaked at US$93.8 billion in 2012, and will fall to US$81.9 billion in 2020. However, cable operators will gain extra revenues by converting subscribers to bundles. Analogue cable TV revenues will plummet by US$14.4 billion between 2014 and 2020 to only US$1.5 billion,” according to Digital TV Research.

Satellite TV revenues are tipped to climb from US$71.77 billion in 2010 to US$94.84 billion in 2020, while IPTV revenues are expected to grow from US$9.73 billion to US$27.87 billion over the same period.

“Global pay TV revenues [subscription fees and on-demand movies and TV episodes] will only grow by 2.6% between 2014 and 2020 to US$207 billion. This follows 14.5% growth between 2010 and 2014,” according to Digital TV Research.

However, it did predict that pay TV revenues will more than double in 33 countries between 2014 and 2020, with most of the fast-growing nations to be found in Africa.