Digital Television Update - 2009 Q4

Q4 2009

Overview

1.1 Consumer survey results for the fourth quarter of 2009 show that take-up of digital television in UK households stood at 91.4%, up by 1.9 percentage points (pp) in the quarter and 2.6% year on year.

1.2 Consumers are continuing to convert additional sets in the home. As a result almost 69% of all secondary TV sets had been converted to digital by the end of Q4, up by around 8.5 percentage points in a year.

1.3 Taking these figures together, 79% of all TV sets had converted to digital television by the end of Q4 2009 (up 6.7 percentage points on a year ago). The remaining 21% of sets continue to receive analogue terrestrial broadcasts.

Other findings

1.4 Other findings in the fourth quarter of 2009 include:

• Sales of DTT enabled equipment reached over 4.7 million units in Q4, the highest quarterly sales so far and up by 6% on Q4 2008. Integrated digital television sets (IDTVs) accounted for almost 74% of sales in the quarter (3.5 million units); with around 99% of TV sets sold now including an integrated digital decoder.
• Freeview set-top boxes accounted for almost 1.2 million sales in the quarter, down 7% on the previous Q4. In 2009 almost 13.7 million DTT units (IDTVs and set-top-boxes) were sold, compared to 12.5 million in 2008, an increase of 9%.
• The number of homes relying on DTT as their sole means of digital TV reception reached around 10.1 million according to survey results in Q4 2009. This was equivalent to almost 40% of all homes and up by around 1.6 percentage points on Q3 2009. Separately, Freeview also reported in December 2009 that it was the main digital TV service in 10 million homes.
• Q4 sales data from BBC/ITV freesat show that unit sales had reached over 900,000 by the end of December, up from around 650,000 units in Q3. Over three quarters (80%) of freesat decoders sold supported HD services by Q4. According to our consumer research results for Q4, around 643,000 homes claimed to be using some form of free-to-view digital satellite device as their primary means of viewing on their main set.
• In total, around 42% of households (10.8 million) received a free-to-view digital television service on their main set at the end of December; 39.6% had a non-pay DTT service and 2.5% had free-to-view satellite.
• The Q4 survey also indicated that approaching 9.2 million or almost 36% of homes, received satellite pay TV services, up 1.1 percentage points year on year. BSkyB reported that it added 172,000 subscribers to its pay television service in the UK and Republic of Ireland during the fourth quarter; we estimate that around 150,000 of these were UK additions.
• Research results for Q4 show that 12.4% of homes took cable television. Separately, Virgin Media reported net additions of over 34,000 TV subscribers, with its total TV customer base now over 3.7 million. Digital cable added around 57,000 subscribers in the quarter (when including conversions from analogue cable) and accounted for 98% of all cable television customers.

1.5 The following points to note on the platform shares in this report include:

• In calculating platform totals, DTT-only homes are defined as those where DTT is the only multichannel television platform in the home (figures for homes which have DTT as well as another platform are included in Sections 2 and 3 of the report).
• A household with either a satellite or cable subscription in addition to DTT equipment may often be recorded primarily as a satellite or cable home by survey respondents.