November 7, 2016

Italy

General Information (Last Update end 2023, source Dataxis)

Market in Volume 

• Population 59.0 mln
• Number of households 25.7 mln
• TV sets installed base 44.6 mln
• Smart TV installed base 21.0 mln
• Smart TV installed base 82% of HH
• Addressable households on HbbTV devices 11.7 mln
• Addressable households on HbbTV devices 46% of HH

Market in Value – Total TV revenues (FTA + Pay TV)

• Total TV network revenues 5,553.5 in mln EUR

Market Structure – Top Broadcasters by Market Share (% of total TV network revenue)

• RAI Italy 43.2%
• Mediaset Italy 29.2%
• Sky Italy 9.7%
• Discovery Networks Italy 8.3%
• Other broadcasters 9.7%

Addressable TV Market Status

• Italy has adopted the HbbTV 2.0 standard in 2017. MHP legacy devices left pace in favour of HbbTV terminals; they are not anymore supported. Italian public service broadcaster and most of the Italian commercial broadcasters, including local broadcasters, offer a vast variety of HbbTV based services like 7 days catch-up TV, EPG (Electronic Program Guide), restart, weather services, portals, ad substitution and L-shaped ad banner. First implementation and deployment of HbbTV-TA was announced in early 2024 and it is now a commercial reality at Mediaset. (source: HbbTV elaboration on broadcasters data)
• In Italy, the overall addressable park on HbbTV already represents more than 9 million households and Publitalia’80 was among the fastest ad sales house in the region to take notice of this potential. They launched addressable campaigns on HbbTV banners back in 2016, then progressively expanded their offer to ad insertion in catch-up video in 2019 and to linear DAI in 2020. There were strong incentives in each of those markets (editor’s note: Germany, Italy and Spain) to launch addressable TV offers, and to specifically choose this technology to do so. Germany, Italy and Spain are each among the top 5 biggest TV advertising markets in Europe, which creates significant market perspectives for ad sales houses. In Italy and Spain, a large majority of people are watching TV using the free-to-air digital terrestrial signal, which enables publishers to address most of their audiences directly on their TV sets. Most of those devices are either already equipped by an HbbTV standard, or likely to be replaced in the upcoming years by a device that will. In Germany, cable operators which account for the biggest share of TV usage also support HbbTV standards (source: Dataxis, ”Addressable TV in Europe: where do we stand one decade after AdSmart?”, April 2023).

Addressable TV – Active Solutions

Top Broadcasters – References