Movistar bleeds fibre users yet its €9.99 streamer just hit record highs
DIGI keeps slashing Spain’s mobile and broadband prices, but Telefónica is laughing all the way to the bank—because Movistar Plus+ is the only thing that still feels premium at under ten euros.
The paradox in 2024 numbers
While DIGI lures away 100-meg customers with €25 bundles, Telefónica Spain closed its best year since 2018. The catch: those gains did not come from pipes. They came from pixels. Movistar Plus+ added 278 000 subs last year, tripling its 2023 pace, and closed December at 3.8 million. Three-quarters of them never signed a fibre contract.
The trick flipped in summer 2023. Telefonica uncoupled the decoder from the router. Anyone with a credit card can now stream LaLiga, Champions, and thirteen Goya-winning films for €9.99 a month—no permanence, no copper, no customer service call centre queue. Vodafone TV and DIGI TV suddenly look like public-access channels from 1998.
Content is the moat, price is the cannon
Movistar’s broadband arm keeps leaking: fibre churn accelerated through Q4. Yet the company offsets every lost euro of ARPU with content margin that Netflix can’t touch in Spain. Self-produced titles such as Los domingos and Sirat brought home two Oscar nominations and kept the platform in the cultural conversation long after the final whistle.
Telefónica won’t disclose average watch hours, but third-party panels show Movistar Plus+ viewers stay inside the app 40 % longer than Disney+ subscribers. That stickiness lets the telco market convergent bundles—fibre, mobile, landline, streaming—at prices 30 % above DIGI without mass defection. The upsell is no longer speed; it is exclusivity.
Next month the service will cut off every Samsung set older than 2018. The outrage on Twitter lasts a day, then renewals arrive anyway. When football is only one click away, hardware becomes disposable.
The lesson other telcos keep ignoring
Vodafone tried the same with HBO Europe; Orange keeps resetting its Lite packages. Both still chase the lowest cost per gigabyte. Telefónica chose the highest cost per minute of attention—and still wins. DIGI may own the spreadsheet, but Movistar owns the screen. In a market racing to zero, that is the only number still climbing.