Faultline has continually flagged the idea that free to air TV services which come from a satellite (especially those with H capability) are a genuine danger to the continued development of pay TV services. We have also expressed the idea that the recession will accelerate this. This week evidence from France suggests that acceleration is dramatic.
SES Astra, said this week that the French digital terrestrial free-TV offer TNTSAT which is delivered via its Astra satellite, is now delivering all over France and has reached 750,000 TNTSAT receivers installed by the end of October. The big change to TNT has been the delivery of some channel in HD even though currently it only copies the DVB-T distributed SD channels.
Last May TNT said that it had 350,000 subscribers, so it has signed up a further 400,000 in just 5 months, which makes it one of the fastest growing formats in Europe.
Initially TNT was only targeted to regions where TV households could not receive signals from terrestrial transmitters and it delivers existing French TV channels which are sent on the French digital terrestrial DVB-T network. The system now has 100% French coverage.
Because of that TNT still measures its opportunity in terms of the number of homes that do not have access to DVB-T, so around 1.5 million French homes. By the time switch off comes in France it will likely have signed up all of those homes or those homes won’t have any kind of TV. But the example of the UK, where Freesat is delivering over 100 channels now and targeting the sign up of 200 channels by Christmas, shows that existing DVB-T subscribers will sign up as well, if there are extra channels to be had or HD versions of them. It’s unclear if TNTSAT will be allowed to deliver extra channels and is currently only offering 18 TV channels.
The TNT HD service will be launched in February 2009 and receivers will be on sale from seven manufacturers and another ten suppliers are being lined up by the end of this year. Back in September there was only one special Sagem satellite tuner using Viaccess conditional access available that could handle HD.
The big disincentive for satellite is that households need a 60 cm satellite-dish pointed to Astra’s prime orbital position 19.2 degrees, as well as a TNT receiver.