Eastern Europe to Add 10 Million Digital Pay-TV Subs by 2025

Eastern Europe is expected to add nearly 10 million digital pay-TV subscribers from 2019 to 2025, bringing its total to 77 million, according to Digital TV Research.

The region, which still had 15.4 million analog cable subscribers by end-2019, will see the number of TV households fall in 16 countries between 2019 and 2025. The region’s TV households are expected to fall by 2.2 million over this period. Russia will account for half of the region’s pay-TV subscribers in 2025, but the country will lose pay-TV subscribers (2.91 million) along with five other countries in the region.

Simon Murray, principal analyst at Digital TV Research, explained: “The number of pay-TV subscribers in Eastern Europe will decline from 83 million in the peak year of 2018 to 78 million in 2025. Migration married with low birth rates mean that populations will fall in 14 of the 22 countries that we cover between 2019 and 2025.”