Screen Digest this week gave us a glimpse of the European cable market, showing off a few of its insightful graphs as an incentive for buying its annual review of the industry. For instance it says the industry has doubled its revenue since 2000 to become a €17 billion ($23 billon) industry today.
It paints the picture that European cable has had to wake up due to rising competition with free to air DVB-T services pressurizing it from below and IPTV, with better interaction, from above. The outcome has been private equity buying out almost all of the moribund cable TV stakes in Europe, injecting capital and driving the business from analog to digital, so that new internet and voice revenues are possible.
Internet and telephony now accounts for more than 40% of European cable revenue, up from just 22% in 2000 and 16% of all European cable TV subscribers are now digital.
During 2006 most growth was from broadband internet sales, up some 27%, with TV subscribers almost flat.