Movistar bleeds broadband but its €10 streaming gambit is winning the war
While DIGI’s €20 fibre-and-SIM combos keep stripping Spanish homes from the incumbents, Telefónica is quietly minting money in a different currency: football, film and Goya statuettes.
The price gap no one can close
DIGI’s playbook is brutal: 300 Mbps symmetric plus 25 GB for €24, flat, no tricks. Movistar’s closest convergent tariff costs twice as much and still caps mobile data. The arithmetic is merciless—Movistar lost 278 000 fixed broadband lines in 2024, the worst exodus since the crisis. Yet the group just posted its best annual margin since 2018. The riddle solves itself when you open the streaming app.
Movistar Plus+ added 278 000 paying accounts last year, tripling DIGI TV’s entire installed base. At €9.99 for the skinny plan—LaLiga goals, Oscar-nominated Sirat, same-day cinema releases—the platform behaves like a Netflix that owns the regional rights locker. You don’t need a Movistar SIM; any fibre, any carrier, any screen. The operator turned its paywall into a revolving door: exit the bundle, enter the content.
From pipe to studio
The shift started in summer 2023 when Telefónica decoupled the decoder from the router. Overnight, the carrier became a production house with 13 Goya wins, including Best Picture for Los domingos, financed with subscription cash. Each award feeds the algorithm; each trophy lowers churn. Vodafone TV and Orange’s low-cost Lite packages still license third-party scraps—Movistar sells exclusives it owns forever.
Translation: the more fibre customers flee, the more valuable the remaining ones become. Average revenue per user on the premium Fusion tier rose 4 % despite headline defection, because the €10 add-on migrates to non-customers too. Telecom margins recast as studio margins; copper rusts, content doesn’t.
The cliff coming in april
Legacy has a deadline. On 15 April the app drops support for 2016 Samsung smart TVs and older Android 7 boxes, a purge that will strand roughly 350 000 domestic screens. Telefónica bets the inconvenience nudges holdouts toward its €5 set-top pod—another hardware sale, another lock-in. Analysts call it planned obsolescence; the CFO calls it “filtering for ARPU.”
Either way, the math is already baked: every displaced user must either pay for a dongle or cancel. Cancellation data from 2022 shows that 62 % of Plus+ drop-outs rejoin within six months, lured by ElClásico or the next Almodóvar short. The net-add curve barely flinches.
So DIGI can keep eroding the copper tail; the empire is retreating to a castle built on codecs and copyrights. Spain will finish 2025 with fewer Movistar broadband lines—but more paying eyeballs than ever. The fibre war is lost; the screen war is over, and Telefónica just raised the price of peace to ten euros a month.