MRG One Day Conference: Fulfilling the Digital Vision

Presenting the latest wave of DART research, Julie Pôrksen, associate director at Ipsos RSL, assured industry figures gathered at the MRG conference in London last week that the UK is well on its way to fulfilling its “digital vision.”

Pôrksen said that digital uptake has been increasingly recently with the lure of more channels and better quality attracting a growing amount of digital subscribers. More than a million households are expected to go digital within the next year, she said, with 38% predicted to sign up to Sky, 18% to ITV Digital and 25% to cable services.

Of those that have no immediate plans to subscribe to digital services 39% said they were happy with their existing channel and 25% said that digital TV was too expensive. Porksen explained that this equated to 12.6 million potential subscribers who would go digital if these barriers were removed.

Despite the fact that 11.6 million people said that they would never get digital TV Pôrksen said that the market will become increasingly stable over the next twelve months, with Sky’s position as market leader remaining relatively unchallenged.

She said that with 24.2 million adults that could be persuaded to subscribe to digital services in the near future, pay-per-view digital TV has the potential to turn from an “unwanted luxury into a necessity.”

More information about the MRG conference can be found on the MRG website: www.mrg.org.uk