Digital TV take-up nearly at 90%

Take-up of multichannel television on main sets in UK households increased to 89.6% in the first quarter of 2009, up by 0.7 percentage points from the last quarter of 2008, according to latest Ofcom figures.

Ofcom’s Digital Progress Report for the first quarter of 2009 showed the penetration figures up 2.4 percent year on year.

With the TV analogue signal due to be turned off in 2012, a majority of main household sets are now able to receive digital TV and many consumers are now converting additional sets in the home. The report shows 61% of all secondary TV sets had been converted to multichannel by the end of Q1, up by around 8 percentage points in a year.

Taking these figures together, the report shows 73% of all TV sets had converted to multichannel television by the end of Q1 2009. The remaining 27% of sets continue to receive analogue terrestrial broadcasts.

Freeview is still the most widely-used service on main sets and accounted for around 9.8 million or 38.5 percent of homes in the period surveyed. The number of homes using DTT on any set in the home reached almost 18 million or 70 percent in the first quarter of 2009, up by around 313,000 on the previous quarter.

Sales of digital terrestrial television DTT-enabled equipment in the first quarter reached almost 3.4 million units which is an increase of seven percent on the same period of the previous year. Integrated Digital TVs accounted for almost 73 percent of sales in the quarter, 2.5 million units, with around 93 percent of TV sets sold now being digital.