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03|10|08

Digital TV figures

The number of UK homes tuning into digital TV via free-to-view satellite is fast approaching a million, Ofcom can reveal today.

Our research found that by the end of June, around 840,000 homes were using free satellite on their main television set.

These include people who have BSkyB’s non subscription services – like ‘Freesat from Sky’ or ‘Sky Pay Once’ – as well as viewers who have bought the BBC/ITV freesat service.

The BBC/ITV freesat service - which was launched at the end of May - offers around 130 free digital and radio channels without a subscription.

Freeview

It has since sold a further 60,000 units, bringing the number of homes using a free satellite service to around 900,000.

The number of homes with Freeview on their main set reached 16.7 million by the end of June, helped in part by a surge in sales of TVs with built-in Freeview receivers.

Shoppers picked up more than 1.4 million of these TVs between April and June, a 54% increase on the year.

These figures and more are included in our latest Communications Market: Digital Progress Report, which covers the second quarter of 2008.

Digital TV

It reveals that 88 per cent of households now have digital TV on their main set, while over half of the 35 million secondary sets in the UK have also been converted to digital.

Both BSkyB and Virgin saw their customer numbers rise.

The amount of BSkyB subscribers in the UK and Ireland grew by 92,000 to reach 8.9 million households.

Over the same period Virgin Media added a further 24,000 TV customers, bringing its total number of cable subscribers to more than 3.5 million.

Almost half of these customers were using Virgin’s video on demand service (VoD). It now includes the BBC iPlayer, which achieved 10.5 views in June alone.

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