It has always been said that the final 15% will be the most difficult to convert to digital TV and Ofcom’s latest Digital Television Update shows that to be the case. In the third quarter take-up of multichannel television on main sets increased by just 0.2 points (pp) from 88.0% in Q2, and up by 3.1 pp year-on-year.
The positive news is that 60% of secondary sets have now been converted to digital TV reception. There was also good news for the newly launched free-to-air satellite platform Freesat reached almost 108,000 by the end of September, an increase from 39,000 in Q2, and the 100,000 figure released by Freesat itself on September 29. Ofcom’s total figure for FTA satellite reception has been revised downwards from 800,000 to 600,000, which the regulator attributes to a smaller sample size in this area.
16.2 million households now have access to the DTT platform commonly known as Freeview with 3.0 million homes still reliant on analogue reception. Multichannel television is subscribed to by 22.6 million homes. DTT pay platform Top Up TV has made up the 100,000 subscribers lost in the previous quarter and now stands at 400,000.
TV over ADSL registered a 10,000 increase on the quarter to reach 80,000 homes, a figure lower than other sources suggest.
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