The Competitive Intelligence Unit: In Mexico OTT continues to be complementary to pay TV

While in the US there are already signs of the decrease in pay TV subscriptions in favor of growth in the number of OTT platform users, in Mexico, OTT subscriptions are already as high 6.7 million, equivalent to a 39.6% annual growth since its introduction in the market in 2011.

In contrast, the pay TV service recorded 20.8 million subscriptions at the end of 2016, figure that represents an adoption of more than 6 out of every 10 Mexican homes. It is noteworthy that it took pay TV more than 5 decades to reach this amount of users, whereas subscription to OTT services already reaches one third of homes in a bit over 5 years.

Substitution or complementarity of OTT in pay TV? Although it is frequently said that people are practically quitting to watch content on TV (open or pay) to only do it on digital platform, information from The Competitive Intelligence Unit indicates that 88.9% of homes with pay TV intend to continue with their subscription or even plan on hiring a premium package in the next six months, and only 7 out of 100 would migrate to a subscription on an OTT platform.