Swedish-Finnish Telco TeliaSonera grew a wide ranging pay TV services this quarter, adding 44,000 pay TV homes across a wide slew of territories taking in Scandinavia, and parts of Eastern Europe including Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia and taking pay TV homes to 886,000.
In Sweden it jumped to 431,000 IPTV pay TV customers up from the 418,000 it had last quarter and 396,000 a year ago. Finland saw much of the Pay TV growth , now up to 207,000 from 189,000 a quarter ago and from 176,000 a year ago. Prior to that subscriptions had been static for two years.
In Denmark TeliaSonera was a combination of a fiber and cable TV company Stofa, which was declining and which it sold off to Swedish Private Equity firm Ratos back in July, when it had around 206,000 customers. It also has its own home grown fiber networks in Denmark and Norway, which offer IPTV but has only accumulated 4,000 and 5,000 subscribers respectively.
But despite this selling of 206,000 pay TV homes, the total number across the year has risen some 147,000 mostly by growth in Eastern Europe, which is accelerating. In Lithuania TV customers jumped to 121,000 from 114,000 last quarter and 103,000 a year ago; in Estonia it is now 118,000 and was 113,000 last quarter which was unchanged from a year ago. In Latvia it owns 49% of Lattelecom, which in turn saw pay TV hike to 153,000 homes from 105,000 last quarter, and 46,000 a year ago.
Meanwhile late last week France Telecom revealed its pay TV numbers when it released its financial figures with Digital TV customers up to 3.8 million, with most of these taken up with 3.2 million in France and 497,000 in Poland. Most of these are IPTV customers, although there are a few satellite DTH customers in Poland as well.
This represents a 30% year on year increase and a rise of 882,000 new customers up from 2.9 million a year ago. In France the increase was just 27% year on year while in Poland the TV numbers grow 76% over the 12 months.
Last week Norwegian Telco Telenor came out with its third quarter, with its Canal Digital subsidiary, delivering both cable and DTH pay TV services to homes and both numbers were slightly down. The DTH operations fell 14,000 in the quarter to 1,025,000, down 46,000 from 1,071,000 a year earlier. Cable customers were up by 4,000 on the quarter but down from this time last year to 717,000 from 732,000 in 2009.
Sky and Virgin in the UK have already been reported on by Faultline, and Deutsche Telekom has announced its results today (see separate story). Telefonica, another major IPTV provider in Europe, will report a week later on November 11, while Kabel Deutschland, the biggest individual cable operator in Europe, will report on November 16.