'Mena region pay-TV market to grow 38 per cent in six years'

The Middle East and North Africa will see its pay-TV market grow by 38 per cent over the next six years, according to a new report from Informa Telecoms & Media, with the number of pay-TV subscribers expected to increase from 5.1 million at the end of last year to over 7m by 2013.

Much of this growth in subscriber numbers is expected to come from Israel and Turkey, which will account for 4.3m pay-TV homes between them at the end of the period according to the report, entitled 'Middle East & Africa TV (fifth edition)'.

Furthermore, 61 per cent of homes in the region were found to have a multichannel TV service at the end of last year, and this total will increase by 14m households over the next six years to result in a penetration rate of 72 per cent. This increased penetration is expected to be the stimulus for a major increase in the region's advertising revenues, which will grow by 73 per cent during the forecast period from $1.9 billion at the end of 2007 to $3.3bn in 2013.

Adam Thomas, Media Research Manager for Informa and author of the report, said: "Middle East TV benefits from several encouraging factors, such as the common language and culture for much of the region and a tradition of high TV consumption. Macroeconomic factors are generally positive too and an expanding and young population is creating a media-positive environment."

While the overall picture is generally positive, impediments to more impressive growth include the disparity across much of the region between the disposable income of a wealthy minority and the rest of the population, with operators targeting only a relatively small proportion of wealthy locals in addition to a sizable expatriate community, restricting the prospects for profitability.

According to Thomas: "Some of the major TV operators are loss-making and seem to be some way off financial self-sufficiency. But their heavyweight financial backers appear content to continue funding them indefinitely. The difficulty with this situation is that operations with a non-commercial objective compromise those with commercial strategies, so distorting the market to an extent."