Ten pct tax on pay TV stopped sector's growth in its tracks

The special tax on pay-TV services introduced last year has damaged what had been one of the country's few flourishing sectors, to the extent that growth in Greece's pay-TV market ground to a virtual halt in 2016, posting a negligible increase of 0.2 percent over the 2015 level.

According to figures announced by the country's two main service providers, OTE (for Cosmote TV) and Forthnet (Nova), the market at the end of 2016 amounted to about 940,000 subscribers. That was up by just 2,000 subscribers from 2015, when the annual rise had come to 79,000 subscribers. In 2014, some 153,000 new subscribers signed up.

Experts attribute this course to households' financial woes and mainly to the new 10 percent levy on pay-TV bills. As in the case of mobile telephony, the Finance Ministry calculates value-added tax both on service charges and on the levy - which means taxing the...