Pay TV is not something that you immediately associate with either the Middle East or Africa, and nor should you because UK researcher Informa says that it will grow by just 36% over the next five years in its latest annual report on the subject.
The region currently has just 4.5 million pay TV subscribers at end-2006 and this will grow to only 6.1 million by 2012, a pitiful compound annual growth rate. Much of the growth will come from Israel and Turkey, who will account for 4.2 million pay TV homes between them at end-2012.
The Informa research also discovered that, of the region’s 54.8 million TV homes, 30.5 million have a multichannel TV service ‘ giving a 55.5% penetration rate. By 2012, that number will approach 40 million, giving 62.3% penetration.
The report points out the obvious problems of huge swathes of poor with virtually no disposable income, and a concentration of wealth into a very low percentage of the population in each country. The report doesn’t seem to cover South Africa which we know has substantially more pay TV homes.