Spain's pay-TV subscriptions reached 12.6 million in the second quarter of 2026, a rise of 9.4 per cent year on year, according to the National Markets and Competition Commission (CNMC). The figure excludes the major streaming platforms, so it tracks traditional operator TV rather than the full subscription video market.

The regulator published the data on 16 October. It covers Spain's telecommunications and audiovisual markets. Netflix, Prime Video, HBO Max, Disney+ and SkyShowtime all sit outside the count, meaning the reported growth understates total household video spending.

What is driving the growth?

The expansion comes amid sustained competition between telcos and streaming providers for viewers and household budgets. Traditional pay-TV packages increasingly bundle television with fixed broadband and mobile services, while streaming platforms compete on exclusive content, original productions and live sports.

Bundling remains the operators' core defensive play. The CNMC counted 12.5 million quadruple-play and quintuple-play packages during the quarter. That is nearly the same size as the entire pay-TV base, which shows how rarely Spanish households now take television as a standalone product.

Packages combining fixed broadband, mobile telephony and mobile broadband added 204,000 subscriptions in twelve months. They closed the quarter at 2.7 million, giving operators a second bundling vector beyond the classic TV-led convergent offer.

How did the operators perform?

Retail telecommunications revenues totalled €5.64 billion in Q2, virtually unchanged from a year earlier. Growth in subscriptions is therefore not translating into revenue growth — Spain remains one of Europe's most price-competitive markets.

Four operators controlled 82.8 per cent of retail telecommunications revenues:

• Movistar — retail revenue declined by 2.4 per cent year on year
• Vodafone — grew by 1.1 per cent
• MasOrange — remained broadly stable
• Digi — posted the strongest growth among the four, at 14.4 per cent

Digi's 14.4 per cent revenue increase stands out against a flat market of roughly €5.64 billion per quarter, or about €22.6 billion annualised. Movistar's 2.4 per cent decline, by contrast, represents continued erosion at the incumbent despite its scale.

What does the fibre data show?

High-speed connectivity keeps expanding. FTTH connections reached 81.5 million installed accesses, up from 80.6 million a year earlier — an addition of 900,000 accesses in twelve months, or roughly 75,000 per month.

By June, 91.4 per cent of fixed broadband lines were fibre-based. That share leaves cable and copper as marginal technologies in the Spanish access market and confirms fibre as the default delivery layer for the convergent bundles that carry most pay-TV subscriptions.

What does this mean for practitioners?

For operators, the numbers confirm that television now functions as a retention tool inside converged packages rather than a standalone revenue engine. The 12.5 million quad- and quintuple-play bundles against 12.6 million pay-TV subscriptions make that ratio explicit.

For the regulator and market watchers, the exclusion of the five major streaming platforms leaves a growing blind spot. The CNMC's pay-TV series measures operator television only, and the agency has not yet published a complementary streaming dataset that would complete the picture of Spanish household video spending.

The next CNMC quarterly release will show whether the 9.4 per cent growth rate holds as operators push further into live sports rights to defend their bundled television base.