“The competition is going to reach a new level of intensity in the second half of this year,” an analyst at Screen Digest in London, Tim Westcott, said.

Italian television is unusual because the country has virtually no cable service, and new services that send programming over broadband Internet connections — a technology that is growing rapidly elsewhere in Europe — have been slow to catch on. Not long after Sky Italia was created, Mediaset started a pay-TV service, using encoded signals broadcast digitally, over the regular airwaves. With set-top boxes and prepaid cards, like those that many Italians use to pay for cellphone services, viewers can unscramble the signals, which include broadcasts of top soccer matches.