UK digital TV take-up reaches 92.5%
April 6, 2011
Take-up of digital television in UK households is at 92.5 per cent, up by 1.1 percentage points year on year, according to Ofcom’s consumer survey results for the fourth quarter of 2010.
Ofcom found that 75.8 per cent of all secondary TV sets had been converted to digital by the end of December 2010, up by 6.9 percentage points in a year. Taking these figures together, 83.2 per cent of all TV sets had converted to digital television by the end of Q4 2010.
Sales of DTT-enabled equipment reached 3.9 million units in Q4, down by 18.6 per cent on Q4 2009. Integrated digital television sets (IDTVs) accounted for over 80.4 per cent of sales in the quarter (3.1 million units). In total, 12.8 million DTT units (IDTVs and set-top boxes) were sold in 2010, compared to 14.7 million in the previous year, according to Ofcom.
The number of homes claiming that DTT was their primary means of digital TV reception was 10 million, according to survey results in Q4 2010, equivalent to 38.9 per cent of all homes.
Around 1.6 million homes claimed to have access to some form of free-to-view digital satellite device on any set in the home. This was up from around 0.9 million in a year.
The Q4 survey also indicated that almost 9.4 million, or 36.7 per cent of homes, received pay-satellite TV services, up 2.5 percentage points in a year. 13.0 per cent of homes took cable television, up from 12.4 per cent a year before.