12/03/2025 - The country’s media landscape is marked by a growing adoption of SVoD, but strategies are needed for operators to retain subscribers, and to attract both younger and older audiences

At a presentation on 6 March by Lauren Liversedge, with data sourced from market operators, analytics and media consumers, Ampere Analysis’ research publication “From Pay TV to Streaming: Navigating Germany’s Changing Media Market” was broken down in order to highlight the characteristics of the titular country’s current situation.

The presentation started off by analysing the situation of pay TV, SVoD platforms and broadcasters in Germany and the rest of Europe’s big five – ie, France, Italy, Spain and the UK. Regarding pay TV, the projection for the five-year period between 2024 and 2029 shows a 5% growth in revenue in Germany alongside France, with 6% (a country where pay TV is almost always included in broadband bundles), confirming the nation’s resilience when it comes to pay TV. The other three countries either show no growth (Italy) or a negative number of -8% (Spain and the UK).

Delving deeper into the different types of access to pay TV, cable is clearly dominant in the market, making up 48% of all such subscriptions in 2024. Interestingly, the dominance of cable has always been historically driven by a policy known as ancillary cost privileges, which meant that basic cable TV subscriptions were included within tenants’ utility bills. This changed in July last year, when the policy was abolished and tenants were given the freedom to choose their preferred TV technology for the first time in decades.

The change in the law has caused the loss of around 4.5 million basic cable subscribers and an increase in subscriptions for IPTV services, which saw significantly higher growth in 2024 compared to previous years. This was partly due to the fact that IPTV is an easily accessible technology, but it was also largely helped by the aggressive promotions introduced by providers that were trying to win over the newly targetable audience. In 2019, the household penetration of pay TV represented 64%, dropping to 53% in 2024. This crossover point marks a major milestone in Germany, with more households now subscribing to streaming services than pay TV, despite the fact that, in comparison with the other European big five, Germany only reached the moment at which SVoD surpassed pay TV in 2024. Spain hit this milestone as early as 2019, followed by the UK and Italy in 2020. France is still far from reaching this juncture.

One of the other reasons for this resistance is older viewers (55- to 64-year-olds) delaying their transition to SVoD, as they show the lowest rate of SVoD penetration, with 54% of them having access to at least one service per market (in Spain, the same category shows an average of 74%). SVoD is growing across all markets; in Germany, this came very late, in fact five years later than the other markets, only reaching this point in 2024. Again, this shows the resilience of pay TV in Germany.

Almost paradoxically, the youngest generations are giving results above the average, since 18- to 34-year-old Germans are actually aligned with the UK in terms of SVoD viewing time, measured on a daily basis. Considering that the UK shows the highest SVoD household penetration – 82% predicted by 2026 – this is a significant result for Germany, the prediction for which is around 59% for the same year.

In addition to this, the younger demographics in Germany also have higher average stacking rates, defined as the number of SVoD services taken by the average SVoD household. In fact, young consumers in Germany subscribe to an average of 3.5 services per SVoD household, versus only three in the rest of the group.

What’s more, Germany lags behind the UK in FAST (free ad-supported streaming TV) and AVoD revenue, primarily because of its weaker broadcaster-driven streaming ecosystem. The revenues from non-broadcast-selected streaming services are similar in both countries, but the UK actually generates more than five times more advertising revenue from broadcaster-led streaming services than Germany does. This occurs because UK broadcasters have successfully integrated online advertising, whereas German audiences have traditionally preferred linear or SVoD models.

Ampere Analysis’ presentation suggested that cable and satellite operators should expand their bundling opportunities to aid subscriber retention and also noted that investing in operators’ own VoD services could also increase the value of pay-TV packages. Other suggestions include adding dubbed content or content originally in German to engage older audiences, considering that 71% of the 55-64 age group watches German content regularly and that 70% doesn’t enjoy watching subtitled content. On the other hand, to cater to younger audiences, platforms should focus on horror, sci-fi, fantasy and action, since they are preferred but not very well represented. Older demographics’ usual choices involve crime, thriller and documentary, which, according to younger audiences, are overrepresented.

Finally, social media influences 18- to 24-year-olds more than any other age group when it comes to deciding what to watch. Distributing content on YouTube could represent a good strategy to guide this age range, considering that 94% of it uses the platform on a monthly basis, but between 60% and 75% of these users do not engage with broadcasters on YouTube, meaning that there is some potential for growth there.