Half of digital households choose pay TV services
Almost half of digital television households in the UK are choosing to pay for additional television channels, new Ofcom research reveals.
Ofcom's Digital Progress Report for the fourth quarter of 2008 found that 49.5% of households have a pay satellite or cable service on their main television set, up from 48.6% the previous quarter.
The research also identified that by the end of 2008 a total of 88.8% of households in the UK had a digital TV service connected to their main set, up by 2.4 percentage points since the end of 2007. Homes with access to a High Definition (HD) service also rose to over 1.5 million.
BSkyB's HD service saw the highest ever number of new homes added during the quarter bringing the total to nearly 780,000 subscribers. A further 521,000 cable customers subscribed to Virgin Media's V+ service, while sales of BBC/ITV freesat HD receivers had reached 172,000 by the end of 2008, according to the report.
The total number of households with DTT on any set reached 17.7 million, up from 17.2 million during the quarter.
Nearly 4.5 million DTT devices were sold in the fourth quarter of 2008, the highest sales of DTT equipment to date. Ofcom state this was mainly driven by record sales of HD-capable integrated digital TV (IDTV) sets with nearly 3.1 million sets sold during the period.
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