Deloitte predicts that pay television will double its penetration in 2014

In the coming years, the number of households with multiple subscriptions will continue to grow, as more content owners and multi-platform aggregators become available with new subscription video on demand (SVOD) services.

Deloitte In its latest market survey, it predicts that by the end of 2014 the number of households receiving pay-TV services will have doubled. In total, it estimates that there will be about fifty million households around the world that have two or more paid subscriptions, generating additional income of over $5 billion.

Another ten million households will receive premium programming as part of their subscription to another service, such as broadband.

Over the next few years, the number of households with multiple subscriptions should continue to increase, as more content owners and multi-platform aggregators make new over-the-top subscription video on demand (SVOD) services available over broadband connections. A further stimulus for the market will be the increasing availability of low-cost HDMI dongles, which connect televisions to the Internet.

Most of these fifty million households will enjoy a primary paid service based on a platform (satellite, cable or IPTV) and secondary SVOD. Even, according to Deloitte, the number of homes that could have three or more of these services could rise to over five million.

By the end of 2015, twenty percent of households in top markets will have three or more pay-TV subscriptions.

This trend is contrary to some predictions that stated that households would gradually abandon their pay-TV platforms, replacing them with other broadband SVOD services.

A significant proportion of pay TV subscribers have signaled their intention to stop subscribing in various accounts in recent years, but the reality is that this has remained only an intention as the number of pay TV subscribers has remained constant or even continued to increase in many countries, even in markets with high pay TV penetration, such as North America, where more than 90 percent of households have pay TV.

Deloitte highlights in its report that, in markets where there are multiple operators offering pay television platforms (satellite, cable or IPTV), players are beginning to offer some of their programs in SVOD to customers of other platforms.