Absolute Gadget - Digital TV invades 22 million UK homes

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Digital TV invades 22 million UK homes

Written by Matt Chapman
Thursday, 27 March 2008
The number of UK households with digital television on their main set has risen to 22.2 million homes, according to research published by Ofcom today. The increase has come as Freeview and cable show strong growth, the communications watchdog said. The Digital Television Progress Report for October to December 2007 also shows that multi-channel television take-up has reached 87.6 percent of households, up 1.5 per cent from the previous quarter. The growth in digital television was driven by sales of digital terrestrial television (Freeview), which saw its best quarter to date with over four million units sold. That’s up by almost 70 per cent, year on year, helped by the inclusion of Freeview into modern televisions. Cable television also had a strong quarter adding over 61,000 more customers to reach almost 3.5 million subscribers, the highest level of take-up since 2002. Cable, with 13.6 percent share of the television market, has now overtaken analogue terrestrial viewing to become the third largest platform for the first time. Ofcom said that over 15 million homes now have a Freeview device connected to at least one television, an increase of 1.3 million on the previous quarter. Figures show that more second television sets in people’s homes are also being converted to digital. Of the 19.4 million digital terrestrial television enabled sets, 10.1 million are now secondary sets. Satellite broadcaster BSkyB increased its subscriber base by 145,000 during the period to reach 8.3 million. The company saw more than 321,000 additions in 2007 as a whole. When combined with free-to-view satellite households, the total number of homes with satellite reached almost 9.4 million.

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