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BBC: Almost 90% of British homes are using digital TV, reveal figures from Ofcom. The latest statistics on take-up of digital TV in the UK suggest that 18 million households, 89.2%, have a DTV receiver.

Digital video recorders, that can store, pause, or rewind live TV, are also proving popular. Ofcom reports that about one million were sold in the first three months of 2009, taking the total in UK homes to 8.9 million.

Switch over The figures, gathered by Ofcom, suggest that five million of those recorders are Sky+ boxes, a further 2.6 million are Freeview recorders, and the remaining 1.2 million is split between Virgin Media’s V+, BT Vision and Top Up TV. The Ofcom report noted a drop of 28% in the sales of Freeview set-top boxes, as TVs with a digital tuner built-in start to take over from the stand-alone devices. Sales of TVs with an integrated tuner have now hit 20 million.

The figures also give insights into how Britain is switching to digital TV in advance of the analogue switch-off, due to be completed by 2012. Analogue signals have already been turned off in a few areas in the UK including the West Country, Scottish borders, and the Isle of Man. With almost 90% of TVs converted to digital, many homes were starting to update older sets. Ofcom estimates that by the end of March 2009, 61% of secondary TV sets were capable of showing digital TV. They also think that about 27% of the TV sets in use in the UK are still only capable of receiving analogue signals.

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Guardian: Nearly 90% of UK households now watch digital television, according to the latest figures from Ofcom.

The media regulator’s quarterly Digital Progress Report shows that 88.2% of households had digital TV on their main sets by the end of September, up 3.1% year-on-year.

This means that 22.5m UK households now have some form of digital TV, the Ofcom research for the three months to the end of September 2008 suggests.

In addition, 60% of all secondary TV sets had been converted to digital up to the end of September, up by 5% on the previous quarter.

Taken together, the proportion of all TV sets in the country that have been converted to digital reached 72% in the last quarter, up by 3% on the previous quarter.

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HD News: Research published by the TV industry regulator OFCOM details how the UK has embraced the High Definition (HD) and digital revolution.

The UK leads the world with an impressive 86% of UK households now hosting digital TV’s as their main viewing set. The US and France followed with a 70% and 66% take up respectively.

Although High Definition subscribers in the US and Canada accounted for a massive world wide take up of 87% (7.9 million of the total) the UK accounts for over half of the remaining 1.2 million HD subsriptions making it a clear leader in Europe.

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ITProPortal: Communications Watchdog Ofcom will allow UK mobile phone users to have a say in where the mobile industry should be heading in a consultation that aims at capturing “different points of view”.

The campaign will be spearheaded by a blog called Mobile Citizens, Mobile consumers which will be “discussing Ofcom’s Mobile sector Assessment”, something especially exciting as the number of calls from mobiles is set to overtake those from landlines by 2010 according to … Ofcom itself.

Ofcom will look at a range of issues that affect the life of everyday mobile phone users : 2G and 3G coverage, competitions, the length of contacts, the impact of pay as you go service, mobile broadband and many more.

Input from users is particularly vital since unlike landline, mobile users tend to change suppliers several times during their lifetime and as the number of mobile phone contracts exceed 70 millions, there has also been a surge in the number of complaints as well.

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Webuser: Sixty-eight per cent of all UK television sets are now digitally linked via cable, satellite or digital terrestrial services.

Industry watchdog Ofcom said in a recent study that householders are continuing to focus on converting their secondary television sets to digital.

Ofcom’s Digital Progress Report for the first quarter of 2008 shows that the total number of digitally linked sets has grown from 33.5 million to 40.5 million in the past twelve months.

There are over 9.6 million homes with Freeview services on their main television set. Sky grew its UK subscriber base to 8.3 million households. The total number of Virgin Media subscribers is now over 3.5 million.

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icWales: As the latest reports reveal more people in Wales are enjoying broadband than ever and satellite TV is more popular here than in any other part of the UK, Tim Lewis looks at what’s pushing the buttons of technology-savvy consumers

THERE is no longer a “digital divide” between rural parts of Wales and those living in urban areas, according to the latest statistics.

A newly-published survey by regulator Ofcom shows Wales is leading the way in the growth in consumption of some technologies.

It revealed Welsh people watch more satellite TV than the rest of the UK with 79% taking a satellite service, 14% higher than the UK average of 65%.

They also listen to more radio than any other part of the UK, 24.4 hours per week compared to a UK average of 23.5 hours.

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Computeractive: People across the UK will get free access to high-definition (HD) television programmes but to view these they will have to replace their set-top boxes.

Currently only people who subscribe to Sky or Virgin can watch HD programmes but Ofcom has announced a planned upgrade of digital terrestrial television (DTT) technology.

This will provide extra capacity for four HD channels and other new services can be broadcast free to air. One will be reserved for the BBC.

Broadcasters ITV, Channel 4, Five and Welsh language broadcaster S4C will have to bid for the other three based on what they can offer viewers and how well they can manage the spectrum.

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The Inquirer: OFCOM has published its plans to revamp the UK’s digital terrestrial television system to enable HDTV services on digital terrestrial system, Freeview.Operators will be required to adopt 64-QAM encoding, which enables more channels to be broadcast per multiplex.

Currently, only a couple of the six available multiplexes use this mode, with the other four multiplexes using the more robust but lower capacity 16-QAM encoding, introduced in the early days of DTT broadcasting when low power for digital was necessary to avoid co-channel interference with analogue transmissions.

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Absolute Gadget: The number of UK households with digital television on their main set has risen to 22.2 million homes, according to research published by Ofcom yesterday. The increase has come as Freeview and cable show strong growth, the communications watchdog said. The Digital Television Progress Report for October to December 2007 also shows that multi-channel television take-up has reached 87.6 percent of households, up 1.5 per cent from the previous quarter.

The growth in digital television was driven by sales of digital terrestrial television (Freeview), which saw its best quarter to date with over four million units sold.

That’s up by almost 70 per cent, year on year, helped by the inclusion of Freeview into modern televisions.

Cable television also had a strong quarter adding over 61,000 more customers to reach almost 3.5 million subscribers, the highest level of take-up since 2002.

Cable, with 13.6 percent share of the television market, has now overtaken analogue terrestrial viewing to become the third largest platform for the first time.

Ofcom said that over 15 million homes now have a Freeview device connected to at least one television, an increase of 1.3 million on the previous quarter.

Figures show that more second television sets in people’s homes are also being converted to digital.

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HDTV News: The Digital Television Group, a consortium of key broadcasters and manufacturers, is concerned about Ofcom’s plans for high definition TV on the Freeview platform.When the analogue signal switch-off is completed in 2012, Ofcom plans to auction the spectrum for other uses, with HDTV confined to the existing Freeview bandwidth.

HDTV would use MPEG4 compression technology and the DVB-T2 broadcasting standard which is still under development. This would mean that consumers would need to purchase new receiver equipment.

The Digital Television Group believes that this plan is likely to fail and could undermine the future of terrestrial TV.

The group is concerned that the plan places too much faith in the DVB-T2 standard, which has yet to be proved. It wants the spectrum to be available for HD transmissions from at least the five main terrestrial channels.

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Electronista: People are still paying too much for roaming data use in other countries, says Ofcom, the official regulator of media and telecommunications in the UK. The group is pressuring cellular carriers to reduce their charges within the European Union, which can sometimes be prohibitively expensive. “It could cost tens of pounds to download a single PowerPoint presentation,” Ofcom chief Ed Richards has told the Financial Times.

Richards is also opposed to high fees on roaming text messages, along with a common practice of charging for a full minute of voice when a person has only been talking for 20 seconds. Combined, these levies are said to increase cellular bills by 20 percent.

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BBC News: More information and technical support is needed to help vulnerable people who are confused about switching to digital TV, a report from regulator Ofcom says.The watchdog’s consumer panel found many viewers were confused about the equipment needed and were not confident about installing digital TV themselves.

It called for greater help for older and disabled viewers and those who were not proficient in technical matters.

Analogue TV will be switched off in the UK by the end of 2012.

“We wanted to understand the experience of vulnerable consumers as they ‘go digital’,” said panel chairman Colette Bowe.

“They told us clearly that they don’t want money – they want easily accessible assistance and advice to help them through the process.”

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