Fulfilling The Digital Vision
Despite the lure of more channels and better quality digital TV has been relatively slow in getting off the ground. With the Government’s deadline for the analogue switch off looming, Denise Turner, director of insight & effectiveness at the Media Planning Group looks at what the future holds for digital TV.
It’s not been a great week for digital television. It seemed to have a positive start when Sir Christopher Bland wrote of the probability of BT expanding its existing network to distribute television. This was, he said, a way of competing more effectively with cable TV companies NTL and Telewest, both of whom he perceives as a threat to BT. It appeared he was declaring that convergence was the way forward with the threefold offering of telephone, high-speed internet and television services being what customers want.
But that appears to be at odds with the announcements we’ve had from NTL and Telewest this week, both of whom have made major cutbacks, most of which have been in the marketing departments. So either they just haven’t got things right just yet or they’re not offering what people want.
For all the progress that digital television has made in getting off the ground, there have been a couple of pieces of news this week that raise the spectre that perhaps the future will not be as rosy as might be hoped. On an individual channel level E4 celebrates its first birthday this month. It launched in a blaze of publicity last year, bringing with it an air of excitement and freshness. Yet despite the appeal of popular American series such as Friends and ER and the success of the Big Brother live broadcasts last summer, E4 is winning less than 1% of the audiences in multi-channel homes.
Channels such as sports and movies have always done well and been drivers for take-up and viewing. However we all know that time is precious and available viewing time is shrinking which means that all channels have to compete hard to succeed, but are the figures from E4 and similar channels evidence that there is a limit to the number of channels people will watch?. BARB figures would tend to suggest that this may be the case – overall audiences share in digital households for channels other than the five terrestrial ones fell from 48.1% in December 2000 to 45.1% last month.
But there seems to be an even bigger cloud on the horizon for digital television as a whole. In the Independent on Sunday this week an article claimed that Tessa Jowell has admitted the Government will have to delay switching off the analogue television signal until at least 2010 because millions of UK households do not want digital television. We’ve seen on NewsLine this week the latest research from IPSOS which highlights how big the group of ‘Digital Refuseniks’ actually is. Over 11 million people in the UK say that they will never get digital TV. And the picture is made to look even more bleak with the latest retail figures for television set sales. There was a mini-boom in the number of sets sold over the Christmas period but industry estimates claim that of the two million sold to date during January and February, a mere 40,000 or so were multi-channel ready.
It seems we have created a television consumer who wants everything for free. Setting a switch-off date for analogue may in fact be counter-productive as consumers wait for the government to decide to give them the equipment for free in order to meet their own self-imposed deadlines. After all the take-up of digital only really began in earnest when the companies involved gave away free set-top boxes.
Digital television has had success but it has yet to find the hook or hooks that will draw in the rest of the population and make switch-off a possibility. It must find a way to grab the attention of the nation.
Reader Rick Jenner, research executive at Flextech, had this to say in response to the above article:
“According to the latest figures from the platforms themselves, there are almost 9 million homes in the UK with digital television – a momentous feat given that digital TV was only launched just over 3 years ago in the UK. It is a shame that the government has shown a distinct lack of initiative and courage in opting for a later switch-off date, when research shows that once people have been shown the advantages of digital television they are far more likely to take it up. The solution to full digital penetration is making people aware of the huge advantages of digital television and providing a cheap alternative to the current options.
E4 may not be the runaway success many people hoped and thought it might be, but for a new channel it has performed well in its first year. The more established cable/satellite channels (such as Sky One and UK Gold) and newer additions continue to take viewers from the terrestrial channels, with viewing to cable/satellite channels up 15% on last year to 18.8% of adult viewing in all homes. Although viewing was down year-on-year in digital homes in December, for the whole year viewing was slightly up, and people in digital homes are spending more time watching cable/satellite channels than BBC1 and ITV1 combined. Rather than being disappointed that ONLY 45.1% of viewing in digital homes is to cable/satellite channels, I would argue that this is a huge proportion, which reflects the quality of programming available to digital subscribers.
Digital television is already proving to be a great success and will be an even greater one in the future.”
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