scte PRESENTS
TV to IP - The Capacity Challenge Panel 1: Education, Education, Education
UK OTT subscriptions jumped from 21 million in 2019 to 50 million in 2024 and are projected to hit 60 million within five years. Penetration of traditional pay TV in the UK has fallen from 62% in 2014 to 49% in 2024 and is forecast to keep sliding. Advertising is following: at ITV, digital ad revenue has grown from 14% of total to 26%, even as the value of traditional broadcast spot advertising declines. The economics of TV are clearly moving online, whether distribution and infrastructure are ready or not.
The message from the opening Education session was consistent: the UK is in the middle of a structural shift from broadcast to IP television, but that shift exposes economic, technical and social fault lines that have not yet been resolved.
Mo Hamza, Research Director at S&P Global (Kagan TMT), took us through the UK’s fibre story over the past five
years; defined by aggressive ambition, cheap money and now consolidation. He said the UK had seen more than 100 fibre companies appear, all aiming to build full-fibre broadband networks. Many never made it to meaningful deployment. Those that did now face higher borrowing costs, post-Covid economic pressure and heavy overbuild – multiple networks chasing the same streets. Unlike France, where fibre rollout was coordinated, Hamza said the UK has effectively been “a free for all”. The result is a patchwork of overlapping networks and stressed balance sheets. “You can see the premises passed and the penetration. At one point we were looking at something like over 60 to 80 million premises planned for fibre in the UK, which is ridiculous given that we have 30 million premises.” Even so, fibre coverage and penetration are improving. Hamza noted that the UK historically lagged Western Europe on full-fibre but is catching up as Openreach, Virgin Media O2, CityFibre and the other altnets push deeper. At the same time the delivery of television is being reshaped by streaming services which have moved direct-to-consumer and inserted themselves into operator bundles. Across Western Europe, Netflix is now the most integrated third-party app within pay- TV and platform environments, followed by Prime Video, Disney, and HBO. Additionally, pay-TV is changing significantly, general entertainment is migrating to subscription VOD (SVOD), advertising VOD (AVOD), YouTube, TikTok and Instagram. This largely leaves sport for the traditional pay-TV operators, and even that is under threat.
DTG director-general Richard Lindsay-Davies asked if we were ready for the transition. The UK has already gone from
in an IP world; the Media Act, which is the first major UK media legislation since 2003 and is explicitly about protecting public service media in a digital environment; and the DCMS Future of Television Distribution Forum, which is due to wrap up this year. Once the findings are made public, government will have to make hard choices: how fast to push into IP, how to protect audiences who can’t or won’t migrate, and how to support public service broadcasting in a commercial environment that looks more like YouTube than Freeview. The DTG recently studied how older viewers interact with modern TV interfaces. The findings were blunt. Older
analogue to digital, and now sits in a hybrid world of broadcast plus IP. The next move, he said, is towards all-IP television. Government has not yet fixed a date. He suggested 2034 as a potential date but stressed it could be later. What matters is that when TV is “put on the Internet, it will follow Internet rules”. That means global platforms, global ad models and global competition. He pointed to three active processes in the UK: Ofcom’s forthcoming work on how TV advertising should be regulated
Volume 47 No.4 DECEMBER 2025
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