African pay TV revenues to reach US$6bn

African pay TV revenues will climb from US$4.4 billion (€4.1 billion) last year to reach US$6 billion by 2021, according to research by Dataxis.

For the year ending 2016, Africa pay TV subscribers stood at approximately 18.7 million subscribers, representing an increase of approximately two million subscribers compared to the previous year.

Pascal Orhan

Of these 18.7 million subscribers, 14 million were direct-to-home subs and the remaining were mostly pay digital terrestrial television (DTT) customers, with “limited cable and IPTV deployments”.

“The satellite operator MultiChoice, owned by Naspers Limited has been the key player in Anglophone Africa pay TV market since its launch. However, the new entrant of the year, Econet Media/ Kwesé along with StarTimes and Zuku will change this configuration”, said Dataxis chief analyst, Pascal Orhan.

Dataxis predicted that the DTT digital migration process in Sub Saharan African should be completed by 2021, though said that today “the full transition is still far from completed”.