Just 7.4% of households in Portugal exclusively use the DTT platform for their television viewing.
The data has been published by the communications regulator Anacom and detailed in its report Means of Access to the TV Signal in 2024.
16.2% of households simultaneously accessed both pay-TV and DTT in their main residences.
Across the country, and looking at main residences, 88.7% of households used pay-TV as their main means of access to a TV signal. In turn, DTT was used by 23.7% of households in their main residence, though not necessarily exclusively. The percentage of households with DTT access in this type of residence fell by 9.4 percentage points (pp) between 2023 and 2024, reaching the lowest figure since 2016.
About 10% of households had secondary residences, with almost half of them reporting having some DTT access there (46.0%).
Considering the main residences and the households with secondary residences, it is estimated that around 25.7% had access to the TV signal through DTT. This was lower than the previous year (-8.7 pp.).
With regard to the amount of equipment, 1.6 million television sets with access to DTT were counted in 2024 (-24.6% compared to the previous year). Television sets in main residences contributed to the fall (-28.5%), representing 85% of the total TV sets with access to DTT.
DTT households tend to have more than one TV with this type of access, both in main residences and in secondary residences.
Household make-up and income influence the means of access to the TV signal used. Families with children and with higher incomes tend to experience greater penetration of Pay TV. By contrast, families without children, and lower-income households, saw higher rates of DTT penetration. About 16.4% of lower-income households (had exclusive access to DTT.
Compared with the previous year, there was a decrease in the rate of DTT penetration in single-parent families and in families composed of two adults with children.
