Italy: 93m connected screens
March 27, 2023
From Branislav Pekic in Rome
The expansion of broadband coverage in Italy – currently available to 90 per cent of households – has been followed by a boom in connected screen ownership, according to the annual report from audience rating company Auditel.
In the last five years, the number of connected screens has risen from 70 million to over 93 million out of a total of around 120 million screens present in the homes and pockets of Italians.
The driver of growth has mainly been Smart TV (+210 per cent), with the number of devices rising from 5 million to over 18 million.
A further impetus is expected from the switch-off process for the new DTT standard (DVB-T2) and, above all, from the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNNR) which has set as a target 1 Gbps broadband coverage for all Italian households, by 2026.
Meanwhile, media consumption is increasingly polarised on a generational level. Currently, 70 per cent of the media consumption of young people between 18 and 24 years of age now passes now through digital devices, while the over 45s show the opposite behaviour, where almost 80 per cent of the time spent is spent on traditional TV.
Rising interest rates, a halt to the subscription race and falling stock prices have forced the OTTs to drastically cut back on the production of original content ( down 40 per cent compared to 2019) and to tighten the sharing of passwords for content.