more people will be accessing digital terrestrial TV (DTT) than traditional, analog free-to-air broadcasts in the region. The conclusion is just one of a number of findings and projections that appear in a new report published by Dataxis, the leading market research company tracking the Latin American television and telecoms industries.
By the end of 2012, Dataxis projects that there will be 12.3 million households actively receiving DTT transmissions in Latin America’s seven largest markets, equaling to 9.4% of TV households in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru and Venezuela. DTT adoption has been accelerating in Latin America, particularly since 2010, a trend that is expected to continue over the next few years.
By the end of 2017, 31 million households (nearly 22 percent of the population owning a TV set) will be using a combination of standalone set-top boxes and integrated digital TVs to decode free-to-air DTT broadcasts. This means that, in the medium term, DTT adoption will surpass the number of households subscribing to digital cable television services in Latin America, trailing only digital satellite TV subscribers.
“The big picture of the state of DTT in Latin America looks more like a collage than a coherent photography right now,” said Juan Pablo Conti, senior analyst at Dataxis and author of the report. “While some countries such as Mexico decided very early on about the technology they would use to deploy their infrastructure but are still several years away from offering 100 percent coverage, others such as Argentina only really started to work on DTT a couple of years ago and already have about 70 percent of the population covered by the technology.”
Brazil will be the country recording the greatest number of DTT households in Latin America: about 65 percent of the region’s DTT homes in 2017. Mexico will be the second-largest market with 10.3 percent, and Argentina will be the third-largest market with 8 percent.
Dataxis projects that, by 2017, DTT will be the most popular television reception platform among TV households without a pay-TV subscription in Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela. The report surveys the size of each national market in terms of number of TV households, households with FTA TV, main FTA broadcasters and advertising expenditure. Spectrum auctions, licensing schemes and proposed analog switch-off dates are also thoroughly analyzed for each market.