The French market, like other mature pay TV and broadband markets, is moving towards an increasingly on demand entertainment model, but regulatory hurdles like France’s chronology of the media which impose lengthy content delays for some OTT services have slowed progress. France’s high penetration rate of IPTV and full featured set-top boxes have primed the consumer base for next generation services which include multiscreen or TVE applications, but many of these services are still in early developmental stages e.g. support is often limited to Android and Apple mobile devices and select CE platforms.
Penetration of pay TV services will remain high, but this speaks more to the activities from service providers than limited opportunities for OTT services, where measurement of success should not equate to cord cutting. Fixed broadband is highly penetrated and 4G subscription growth will help boost the prospects for mobile video, particularly if flexible data plans remain a part of the mobile broadband landscape. Regulatory factors, however, remain a significant issue in determining how this market develops over time.
This report discusses the French over-the-top video and pay TV markets – forecasts to 2018 are provided for French pay TV and fixed broadband households, Internet users, mobile subscribers, and online video viewers.