Only a third of respondents reported making use of internet TV services such as Netflix, a decline of 19 percentage points from results obtained in 2015, according to a Malta Communications Authority survey released on Thursday.

Only 10 per cent of respondents deemed this service to be an acceptable substitute to a local pay-tv service. This suggests that respondents still find their local pay-tv services the best way to watch what they want, especially for local TV channels.

The TV service is also moving away from free-to-air channels, which have dwindled form 4 per cent in 2015 to 1 per cent in 2017 – a percentage which is expected to fall even further in the next two years.

There has also been massive take-up of the IPTV-Android box: 21 per cent of respondents with a standard pay-tv subscription also have the alternative.

The percentage of respondents with a pay-tv subscription saying they were satisfied and highly satisfied with the service stood at 56 per cent and 23 per cent respectively in 2017. Overall, 79 per cent of respondents in 2017 were happy with their pay-tv subscription, compared to 77 per cent of respondents in 2015.

Respondents saying that they are not satisfied with the quality levels of their pay-tv service, cited ‘frequent disconnections’ as the main cause of their dissatisfaction.

However, only 4 per cent of respondents in 2017 switched provider in the previous two years, mostly because the alternative providers did not offer a service that matched their requirements.

The survey found that almost half the Maltese have two TV sets at home, while just under a quarter have three sets or more, slightly higher than the numbers in 2015. Just over two-thirds of Maltese households today have at least one HD TV set at home.