According to Advanced Television, SES has announced that its satellites are now delivering TV entertainment and news programming to over one billion people and 325 million homes.
They confirmed that this represents an 18% growth compared to the figures at the end of 2012, as well as a channel count rise of 36% over the same period. The total channel count at the end of last year totalled 7540, which was a rise from 7460 a year earlier.
Of the 325 million homes, over 130 million have DTH delivery, over 148 million have cable and over 44 million have IPTV. Europe still dominates SES’s reach with around 156 million homes covered, while the figures for North America are 78 million, South America, 37 million, Africa, 10 million and Asia-Pacific with some 43 million.
Around 70% of all European satellite TV homes get their TV channels from SES, and the figure rises to 78% if HD channels are included. Some 94% of European cable TV homes receive their channels from SES. For Germany, the figure is 99% and in the country 2.2 million homes now own UHD displays, which more than doubled in 2016. SES is also transmitting 32 Ultra-HD channels, of which 21 are commercial.
SES’s senior market and business analyst, Ricardo Topham, stated that although there is a rise in the use of OTT services, the SES research data showed that traditional TV viewing remains extremely strong at 96.8% of TV homes, which is a drop of just 0.3% when compared to the end of 2015.
