Digital television in 22 million UK households as Freeview and cable show strong growth

The number of UK households with digital television on their main set has risen to 22.2 million homes according to research published by Ofcom today.

The Digital Television Progress Report for the fourth quarter of 2007 (October-December) also shows that multichannel television take-up has reached 87.6 percent of households, up from 86.1 per cent in the previous quarter.

The growth in digital television was driven by sales of digital terrestrial television (Freeview) which saw its best quarter to date with over 4 million units sold, up by almost 70 per cent, year on year. Cable television also had a strong quarter adding over 61,000 more customers to reach almost 3.5 million subscribers, the highest level of take-up since 2002.

Key trends for the fourth quarter of 2007 include:

DIGITAL TERRESTRIAL TELEVISION (DTT) – Freeview services

Over 4 million Freeview devices were sold during the quarter, up from 2.4 million in the previous quarter. This was the highest quarterly sales so far with growth fuelled by an increase in sales of IDTVs (Integrated Digital Televisions) and set-top boxes. IDTVs saw an increase of 132 per cent year on year and means that almost 70 percent of all TVs sold during the quarter were digital. Set-top box sales reached almost 1.8 million in the quarter, up by 25 per cent on last year’s figure and the highest quarterly sales so far.

Over 15 million homes now have a Freeview device connected to at least one television, an increase of 1.3 million on the previous quarter.

More second television sets in people’s homes are being converted to digital with many consumers having already converted their main sets. Of the 22m DTT enabled sets, 12.4 million are now secondary sets.

DIGITAL SATELLITE TELEVISION – Sky subscribers and free-to-view satellite services

BSkyB increased its subscriber base by 145,000 during the quarter to reach 8.3 million with over 321,000 additions year-on year. When combined with free-to-view satellite households, total satellite households reached almost 9.4 million.

The number of Sky subscribers taking the ‘Multiroom’ service reached over 1.5 million, an increase of 305,000 during 2007, this means that 17% of Sky customers now have at least one extra set connected to satellite television.

Sky’s high definition service, Sky HD, added 64,000 subscribers taking the total number to over 420,000.

The number of customers using Sky+ service increased by 434,000 to reach over 3 million for the first time.

CABLE TELEVISION – Virgin Media services and other cable operators

The total number of homes with cable television continued to rise with nearly 3.5 million customers, an increase of 124,000 homes in the last year, which saw the strongest quarter for cable TV additions since the last quarter of Q4 2000.

Cable, with 13.6 percent share of the television market has now overtaken analogue terrestrial viewing to become the third largest platform for the first time. Analogue terrestrial viewing fell by nine percentage points from 21.4 percent to 12.4 percent over the past twelve months.

There were over 260,000 subscribers to Virgin Media’s digital video recorder service (Virgin+) by the end of the quarter, up by 72,000 on the previous quarter.

Nearly half of all Virgin subscribers (1.5 million) were using its video on demand service per month, with viewing up by 45 percent on the previous quarter.

NOTES
1. The term ‘digital television household’ is defined by the kind of digital service viewed on the household’s primary television set. Therefore, a household with satellite or cable on the primary television set but digital terrestrial television (DTT) on a second set would be defined as a satellite or cable digital household. A household with DTT services on the primary television set and other analogue sets in the home would be counted as a DTT household.
2. BT Vision customers are not counted within the television over broadband figure. This is because whilst downloading is available over broadband, live scheduled television via BT Vision is delivered via digital terrestrial television.

More: Full Report