88% of households now have digital TV

More than 88% of households now have digital TV on their main sets, up from 84% year on year, according to Ofcom’s digital progress report for Q3 2008.

Ofcom’s report found that the total number of homes with DTT (Digital Terrestrial Television) reached 17.2 million, with an extra 2.5 million DDT devices sold in the third quarter alone.

At the same time, almost 1.6 million integrated TV (IDTV) sets were sold, along with 106,000 digital video recorders – bringing the total sales to around 1.1 million.

In terms of pay TV services, Ofcom reported that BSkyB grew its customer base by 87,000 to almost 9.1 million subscribers during the period, while 18% of customers have at least one extra set connected to Sky.

Almost half of BSkyB customers (46%) subscribe to Sky+, while 591,000 (6.5%) have signed up to its HD services, up from 498,000 during the quarter.

Virgin Media also managed to increase its cable subscribers by 37,700 during the quarter, taking them up to 3.6 million households in total.

An additional 43,800 cable viewers signed up to Virgin’s digital video recorder service V+, while almost half (49%) of its customers used its VoD service – there were 45 million total VoD views over the period, up 17%.

However, the report also found that the number of homes with free satellite services has declined, down to 617,000 in Q3 from 840,000 in Q2.

Ofcom: 020 7981 3040 www.ofcom.org.uk