Digital TV takeup growth continues

Caitlin Fitzsimmons
guardian.co.uk, Friday July 11 2008 13.44 BST

The UK is moving rapidly towards digital switchover, with the number of analogue-only homes falling 34% in the year to the end of March, according to the latest figures from Ofcom, the communications regulator.

Ofcom's latest quarterly Digital Progress Report, released today, suggests the number of households without any digital TV dropped to 3.3m in the first quarter of 2008 - 1.7m fewer than the same period in 2007.

The total number of UK households with digital TV is now 22.2m, or 87.2% of homes, the research suggests.

Ofcom has changed its research system since the last report in March and this would have been 88.2% under the old methodology.

In the first quarter of this year there was a net growth of 190,000 homes with multichannel TV, with two-thirds of the new adopters taking free services - Freeview or free satellite.

The upsurge in digital TV takeup is mainly propelled by the growth of Freeview, with a further 1.3m homes adopting the free digital terrestrial television service for their main sets in the 12 months ending March 31, 2008.

Another 14m households now have Freeview on their second TV set, bringing the total number of DTT sets to 23m.

Meanwhile, the number of homes with pay TV digital services reached 12.2m by the end of the first quarter of 2008.

Digital satellite, including Sky and Freesat, is the second most popular way of receiving digital TV in British homes after Freeview.

There are now 9.3m homes using digital satellite for their main TV set, a 37% share and a rise of 230,000 since the first quarter of 2007.

Meanwhile, 3.2m homes are using cable TV as their primary multichannel service, the research suggests. Of these, about 30,000 are still using analogue cable TV.

Virgin Media has 3.5m subscribers and the Ofcom report suggests the discrepancy could be partly due to non-residential subscriptions and some overlap with homes that have both satellite and cable.

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