Advanced Television

SES claims global audience of 1bn

March 21, 2017

By Chris Forrester

Satellite operator SES says its spacecraft are now delivering TV entertainment and news programming to more than 1 billion people and 325 million homes. SES says that this is an 18 per cent growth over the position at the end of 2012. Their data was released by SES’s Senior Market & Business Analyst, Ricardo Topham, who explained that the number was drawn from DTH delivery (130 million+), cable (148 million+) and IPTV (44 million+).

Regionally, it is ‘greater’ Europe which still dominates SES’s reach with some 156 million homes covered, while North America’s coverage reaches 78 million households, South America 37 million, Africa 10 million and Asia-Pacific some 43 million.  Some 70 per cent of all European satellite TV homes get their TV channels from SES, and the number rises to 78 per cent when HD channels are included. SES says that 94 per cent of European cable TV homes receive their channels from SES. This rises to 99 per cent of German homes which receive their TV channels from SES.

SES’s channel count has grown 36 per cent since 2012, and at the end of last year totalled 7540 channels (up from 7460 a year earlier).

SES is now transmitting 32 Ultra-HD channels, of which 21 are commercial (that is not ‘demo’ channels).  In Germany, where SES has carried out some detailed studies (via TNS Infratest) some 2.2 million homes now own UHD displays (more than doubled in the year to December 2016).

Topham stressed that despite the proliferation of OTT services, the SES research data showed that traditional TV viewing, that is viewing of linear TV, remained extremely strong at 96.8 per cent of TV homes (down 0.3 per cent since the end of 2015).

Categories: Articles, Broadband, Cable, DTH/Satellite, IPTV, UHD, Ultra-HD/4K