While the Dutch government is looking at the future of digital terrestrial broadcasting, operator KPN said it hopes to continue the Digitenne service after 2017.
KPN will continue to offer the digital terrestrial TV service Digitenne until at least 2017, the company confirmed to Dutch telco news site Telecompaper.
KPN holds the spectrum licences until January 31 2017, but no decision has been taken yet on the period thereafter. KPN is selling the Digitenne service as an addition to its IPTV service. It offers a bouquet of channels including the main commercial Dutch broadcasters as well as a selection of international channels including VRT, BBC 1 and BBC2. The monthly subscription fee is €12.50. At the end of 2013, KPN had 591,000 Digitenne customers.
The Dutch public broadcasters, both national and regional, transmit their signals over the DTT network free-to-air.
The operator said it expects to continue to offer the service after 2017, noting the DTT service is still used by many customers, especially for second TVs. KPN uses the DVB-T standard for Digitenne and has no plans to upgrade to DVB-T2.
The Dutch government is still considering the future of the DTT service. However any decision will depend on coordination with the EU, where some states are already considering migrating the 700 MHz band to mobile services.
Just recently, Telenet decided to end its DTT platform Teletenne, as it did not generate enough business.
