Mexico leads Latin America when it comes to pay TV subscriptions, with 19.1 million in Q3 2015, nearly one-fourth of all Latin American pay TV subscriptions.
Argentina has the second-most pay TV subscriptions, with 11.1 million, according to Q3 2015 research by Business Bureau (BB). Colombia has 8.1 million pay TV subscriptions, and Venezuela has 6.4.
It should be noted, however, that Brazil is not included in the BB report. A separate report by Dataxis Intelligence put the number of pay TV households—roughly comparable to subscriptions, which in the case of pay TV are typically on the household level—in Brazil at 19.6 million as of 2014.
When it comes to household penetration, however, the rankings change. While Mexico has the most pay TV subscriptions, just 62% of households have pay TV. In Argentina, the country with the second most pay TV subscriptions in Business Bureau's report, 81% of households have pay TV.
Around three-quarters of households in the Caribbean have pay TV, meanwhile. And in Venezuela, 81% of households have pay TV.
Legal pay TV subscriptions are set to grow in the region from 64.4 million in 2015 to 78.7 million in 2019. The share of households with pay TV is forecast to increase substantially over the next few years, as well: from 41% in 2015, to 47% in 2019.
While many regions of the world are trending toward cord-cutting and services like Netflix or Hulu, Latin American countries, and the region in general, are increasingly investing in pay TV.