Insight Analysis: Another Year In The Life Of Digital TV
Since the 1998 launch of the first digital TV service, UK growth has exceeded expectations. Last year saw continued penetration and there are now estimated to be more than 6m digital households in the UK.
Sky Digital’s success has caused analysts to anticipate that switch-off of their analogue service could be as early as July this year. However, despite this success, the prospect of analogue switch-off occurring on a national scale still seems a long way off.
In digital homes, non-terrestrial channels command around 50% of viewing share, compared to around 15% across all homes. During January, average weekly audience share for non-terrestrial channels in digital homes showed a year on year increase of 2.9 percentage points, reflecting the increasing uptake of non-terrestrial TV platforms, and the need for traditional channels to increase competitiveness.
Despite losing out in weekly audience share during January in terrestrial homes, BBC 1 held its end up in digital and all households year on year. On average the channel manages a weekly share of around 20% in digital households, while ITV manages a fraction more. For the smaller channels the status quo remains in terms of audience share and Channel 5 has yet to really benefit from the improved coverage
Preventing ITV from gaining ground on the platform is the ongoing issue of its lack of carriage on Sky. Having to switch back to terrestrial from digital to watch is losing ITV viewers, but frequent promises of an imminent solution have failed to deliver, and now problems with channel capacity may put it back to 2002. Year on year ITV’s average weekly share of viewing for January has decreased in terrestrial and all households and managed to increase just 0.2 percentage points in digital homes.
Looking forwards, in addition to further growth of Sky Digital and ONdigital, digital cable is finally expected to take off this year, having resolved its past hardware availability problems and seen consolidation thanks to the NTL/CWC merger. By this time next year the platform’s current penetration of around 800,000 homes is expected to have grown by around 20%. 