While the COVID-19 pandemic has hit pay TV providers in other regions hard, particularly in the U.S. that is not the case in Europe where growth in Central and Easter Europe more than offset moderate declines in Western Europe.

While pay TV subscriptions in some countries, such as the U.K., have declined overall pay TV subscriptions among tracked pay TV services grew by 402K in 1Q 2020, reaching 139.44M, up 0.3% QoQ. Sky, which was acquired by Comcast in October 2018, continues to lead the European pay TV market with 20.83M subscribers, followed by Vodafone (18.28M), which jumped to the #2 slot with the acquisition of Liberty Global's operations in Germany, Romania, Hungary, and the Czech Republic in Q3 2019.

The European Pay TV Provider Performance Benchmarking is updated quarterly and is published approximately 8-10 weeks after the close of each quarter. A 5-year rolling forecast for pay TV in North America and globally can be found in our Subscription TV Forecast, which is produced twice a year.