Digital TV in 22m homes as Freeview and cable show strong growth

by Staff, Brand Republic 27-Mar-08, 10:25

LONDON - The number of UK households with digital television on their main set has risen to 22.2m homes, according to research published by Ofcom today.

The Digital Television Progress Report for the fourth quarter of 2007 (October-December) also shows that multichannel television take-up has reached 87.6% of households, up from 86.1% in the previous quarter.

The growth in digital television was driven by sales of digital terrestrial television, which saw its best quarter to date with over 4m units sold, up by almost 70% year on year.

Cable TV also had a strong quarter adding over 61,000 more customers to reach almost 3.5m subscribers, the highest level of take-up since 2002.

More than 4m Freeview devices were sold during the quarter, up from 2.4m in the previous quarter, with 15m homes now having at least one Freeview box, an increase of 1.3m on the previous quarter.

Ofcom said this was the highest quarterly sales so far with growth fuelled by an increase in sales of integrated digital televisions and set-top boxes.

BSkyB increased its subscriber base by 145,000 during the quarter to reach 8.3m with over 321,000 additions year on year.

Sky also added 434,000 Sky+ customers to reach over 3m for the first time.

Virgin Media's rival digital video recorder service Virgin+ added 72,000 to rise to 260,000 subscribers. In addition nearly half of all Virgin subscribers or 1.5m were using its video on-demand service per month.

IDTVs made up for almost 70% of all TVs sold as set-top box sales reached almost 1.8m, up by 25% which is the highest quarterly sales so far.

There is also a growing trend to convert the second TV sets in people's homes to digital.

The total number of homes with cable television continued to rise with nearly 3.5m customers, an increase of 124,000 homes in the last year, which saw the strongest quarter for cable TV additions since the last quarter of 2000.

Cable, with a 13.6% share of the television market has now overtaken analogue TV viewing to become the third largest platform for the first time.