The Dutch government intends to auction off the licence for digital terrestrial television in July, 2016. The current licence expires on February 1, 2017.
The Minstry of Economic Affairs has decided to run an auction, as several parties have showed an interest in obtaining the DTT licence.
KPN has asked to extend the current licence with three years. The operator currently owns the licence and offers a DTT product called Digitenne, which broadcasts a 25 channel package containing the major Dutch private networks, the Flemish public channels as well as a number of international channels.
The number of subscribers to the platform is currently in decline with about 380,000 homes at December 31, 2015, down from almost one million subs a couple of years ago.
KPN asked for the extension, as it finds the time to prepare for the auction too short. The operator is also face with the fact that it uses DVB-T and will have to replace all its legacy rental receivers when switching to DVB T-2.
Dutch public broadcaster NPO will see its licence for the fifth multiplex automatically renewed. NPO currently broadcasts its three national channels as well as one regional channel free-to-air. The plan is to switch to DVB-T2 in HEVC 2.65 in the future.
