Digital TV Penetration Update
Date: 17th November, 2009.In the most recent OFCOM Digital Progress report, results for the second quarter of 2009 - the three months to the end of June - shows that take-up of digital television in UK households increased to 89.8%, up by 0.6 percentage points (pp) from 89.2% in Q1 2009. In addition to this almost 70% of all secondary TV sets had been converted to multichannel by the end of Q2, up by around 15 percentage points in a year.
OFCOM's Q2 survey also indicates that 9.6 million, or around 37% of homes, receive Sky satellite TV services (either pay or free-to-view). Pay satellite homes accounted for just over 8.9 million with free-to-view adding a further 700,000 homes during the quarter.
Survey results indicate that almost a quarter (22.3%) of all television sets are now connected to a pay satellite service, up by 2.1pp on a year ago. BSkyB has continued to add both main set subscriptions and also second sets via its multiroom service.
Sky's high-definition (HD) service added 291,000 subscribers in Q2. This was the highest number of HD additions of any quarter to date and took total HD subscribers to over 1.3 million, with 13.9% of all Sky subscribers now taking its HD services. By June 2009, 33 HD channels were available on this service, broadcasting 13,000 hours of HD content per month.
OFCOM's latest results show that just over 12% of homes take cable television. Separately, Virgin Media reported net additions of almost 20,400 new TV subscribers during this period, taking its total TV customer base to over 3.67 million.
Virgin Media reported that 55% of is digital customer base (1.9 million TV customers) were using its video-on-demand (VoD) services and the amount of VoD requests oer viewer were up from 24 in 2008 to 32 on average per month. Total VoD views reached 186 million in Q2 up from 165 million in Q1 2009.
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