Mobile stays prepaid while VOD subscriptions grow but viewing falls
By the end of 2023, FTTC accounted for about 49 percent of the Italy’s total broadband user base of around 18.95 million – with the total only creeping up 22,000 in the year. Despite being almost half, FTTC connections fell 475,000 YoY while FTTH grew by 290 thousand in the last quarter of the year and 978 thousand year-on-year. Compared to December 2019 the FTTH increase is 3.34 million lines. DSL fell 675,000 but was offset by growth in lines in other technology.
Despite some hype around fixed wireless in Italy, FWA increased 150,000 and at the end of December 2023, amounted to 2.11 million subscriptions. The figures are part of Italian regulator AGCom’s latest Communications Observatory. The country’s fixed network overall fell 16,000 on a quarterly basis and now stands at around 20.11 million lines. Copper lines decreased by about 186,000 on a quarterly basis and by 798,000 compared to December 2022. Over the past four years, they have decreased by 5.72 million.
Connection speed have improved: lines with speeds of 100Mbps and above rose from 40.3% at the end of 2019 to 73.4% in December 2023. Of note was the growth in the weight of marketed lines with transmission capacity ≥1GB/s, which increased from 3.2 to 22.2% in the 2019 – 2023 period.
At the same time, the growth in data consumption continues. In terms of overall volume, daily traffic in 2023 marked a 15.6% year-on-year growth, marking, at the same time, a 120 percent increase over the corresponding value in 2019. This is reflected in daily traffic per broadband line, with unit consumption figures more than doubling in the period 2019 – 2023, increasing from 4.23 to 8.52GB per line on average per day.
TIM is confirmed as the largest operator with 38% of lines, followed by Vodafone with 16.4% and Wind Tre and Fastweb with 14.2% and 13.7% respectively. After that comes Tiscali (3.7 %), Eolo (3.5%) and Sky (3.3%).
Mobile dominated by prepaid
In Italy’s mobile network, as of the end of December 2023, there were 108.5 million active SIMs (both ‘human and M2M’), up by just under 1.3 million units year-on-year. Of that however, M2M SIMs showed an increase of 1.2 million units, while that of ‘human’ (i.e. voice only, voice+data and data only involving human iteration) was about 60 thousand SIMs.
Non-M2M mobile lines are 86.5% residential users, while, with reference to contract type, just under 90 percent of subscribers prepaid. Relative to overall sims, TIM is the market leader with 27.8%, followed by Vodafone with 27.1%, Wind Tre with 23.7% and Iliad reaching 9.9%.
Considering only the ‘human’ SIM segment, AGCom said Wind Tre remains the leading operator with 24.6%, followed by TIM with 24.1%, Vodafone with 21.7% and Iliad – with 1.5 percentage points YoY growth – has reached 13.7%. After that comes PostePay (5.4%), Fastweb (4.6%) and CoopVoce with 2.7%.
An estimated 58.6 million ‘human’ SIMs produced data traffic during the last quarter of 2023, which is about two million more than in the corresponding period of 2022. In 2023, daily mobile data traffic grew year-on-year by 21.7% but 245% over 2019. Correspondingly, the average daily unit consumption in the January-December period can be estimated at about 0.78GB, up 21.1% compared to 2022 and more than 230% compared to the corresponding period in 2019, when it was estimated at 0.23GB.
VOD grew but users are watching less
AGCom said paid video-on-demand saw 15.1 million surfers by December 2023 (up 169,000 YoY). On average, in 2023, Netflix registered about 8.7 million unique users (down 1.6%) compared to 2022 and is followed by Amazon Prime Video with 6.7 million visitors (up 3.1%). Disney+, with more than 3.5 million internet users and Sky/Now, with average unique users of 1.2 million, registered growth of 2% and 16.4% respectively, while Dazn (2.1 million average unique users) registered a decline of 9.8% compared to 2022.
Analysing the browsing time on the main video streaming sites offering pay-only services in December 2023 showed a growth of 11.8% YoY. “Analysing the total hours spent by surfers on the different platforms in 2023, allows us to observe, albeit with different intensity, an overall contraction for the main operators with the sole exception of Comcast/Sky’s Now service (up 35.7 percent),” stated the report.
In detail, Netflix dropped from about 376 million hours in 2022 to 360 million hours in 2023 (down 4.1%). Amazon Prime Video also contracted in the amount of time spent viewing its sites and apps (down 20.6 percent, from 69 million hours in 2022 to 55 million hours in 2023), as did Disney+ and Dazn, both of which are declining when considering the total hours spent by users on their sites and apps (decreasing from 30 to 28 million hours and from 9 to 7 million hours of total browsing from 2022 to 2023, respectively.
Free VOD services have 35.4 million unique viewers connected as of December 2023, record a year-on-year decline in audience of 1.5 million. In this regard, in 2023, it is noted that among the free VOD platforms, the most visited ones in terms of average monthly unique users were News Mediaset Sites (with 22.1 million), Sky TG24 (with 9.8 million) and RaiPlay (7.4 million).
Surfing time spent on this type of site last December exceeded 26 million hours, registering a decrease of more than 1.6 million hours compared to December 2022.
The full data for the report can be accessed here [English]