A. Guttmann
Research Lead covering media
Pay TV in Chile - statistics & facts
Chile is among the top five pay TV markets in Latin America. At the end of 2021, Chile reported one of the highest pay TV penetration rates in the region. Almost two-thirds of Chilean TV households had access to the service. But the segment follows a global yet slowly declining trend. It was estimated that, by the end of 2022, the pay TV industry in Chile would have generated 1.21 billion U.S. dollars in revenue. The annual figure was projected to decrease by 3.3 percent throughout the next three years and stand at 1.17 billion dollars by 2025.
Local game, global players
International corporations dominate the Chilean pay TV market. Altogether, Liberty Global, AT&T, Telefónica, and América Móvil concentrated over 80% of all subscriptions in September 2021. That same month, Liberty and América Móvil announced the merger of their local operations in Chile, known as VTR and Claro, respectively. In October 2022 the deal to create a joint venture between the two entities was accepted by the Chilean National Economic Prosecutor's Office. The holdings projected that the new business would serve six million households by 2025. The move may boost the results of both telco providers. VTR's pay TV revenue has trended down since 2019. Meanwhile, América Móvil's overall revenue in the Southern Cone – as the company refers to Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay, collectively – added up to 38.7 billion Mexican pesos in 2022. This was less than five percent of the holding's total revenue.Is pay TV declining in Chile?
It was forecast that Chile would be home to 2.87 million pay TV subscribers by 2023 and that this figure was likely to keep decreasing from then on. The estimate arguably takes into account the skyrocketing popularity of subscription video-on-demand (SVoD) platforms. It is also a reflection of the latest trends in consumer behavior in the South American country. Although the average daily time Chilean viewers spent watching pay TV peaked in 2020, since then the viewership time has been declining. The same is true for viewer numbers, where the hike observed at the start of the pandemic, subsided soon after, and today the number of pay TV viewers in Chile equals the one recorded in 2011.
