The remarkable rise and rise of free satellite TV services in Europe is now being spearheaded not by the early UK introduction of Freesat, but instead by the French TNTSat, ostensibly launched purely to offer rural parts of France with poor terrestrial digital signals, but now responsible for TV in 2.3 million French homes. That’s almost 10% of the 25 million TV homes in France.
The details came out of a release from satellite operator SES talking about retail purchases of termination equipment that will receive the signals. The 2.3 million number is to the end of June 2010 and in the 12 months leading up to this some 800,000 receivers were sold. Sales began back in March 2007.
The principle of Free satellite TV is much the same as free to air broadcasts which rely on advertising, with two exceptions ‘ a 60 cm satellite dish and set top have to be bought at retail and the full price has to be paid, as well as any installation costs, this makes the prospect more like a $300 initial hit, than the subsidized installations undertaken by pay TV satellite providers.
The other difference is that satellites usually have access to enormous bands of spectrum in the 12.5 GHz frequency spectrum, so they can add more and more channels without too much effort. Freesat in the UK now has 140 channels, some of which are HD, while TNTSat offers around 47 French channels and hundreds of international channels.
The TNTSat service is offered by SES and CanalSat. CanalSat itself has almost 12 million paying satellite TV customers, with about 3 million of them outside France.
‘The consistently strong growth shows that French households outside the reach of terrestrial networks adopt TNTSat as a solution to easily switch to digital television,’ says Ferdinand Kayser, President and CEO of SES Astra. ‘With the ongoing transition to digital television, further growth can be expected in the second half of 2010 and in 2011.’
TNTSat offers all programs which terrestrial offers, which includes 18 free to air, plus 24 regional channels as well as four HD channels.
Back in March the UK Freesat said it had passed the 1 million home mark and reckoned it took 400,000 of them from pay TV service BSkyB. This was a leap of about 350,000 homes from its December numbers, and when it next reports numbers it should be up around 1.3 million or better. But while it still seems to be accelerating, the TNTSat offering in France remains substantially ahead. These two operations must be the fastest growing TV platforms in Europe in percentage growth terms, highlighting the potential future for more operations to follow.
In May 2008 TNTSat had just 350,000 subscribers, so in two years it has added 2 million homes. Initially TNTSat said that it was targeting the 1.5 million homes that do not have access to a DVB-T signal, but has now gone way beyond that.
Spain has already decided that digital terrestrial was too inefficient and so began distributing the same TV channels over a free to air satellite, a move that was due for completion just a few months ago. Spain sees this as a fast route to large-scale HD free to air capacity.
Meanwhile in Italy in 2008 public broadcaster RAI and commercial rival Mediaset, jointly launched TiVuSat using Eutelsat’s Hot Bird satellite, the same one that rival Sky Italia uses, using an encrypted signal so that future channels can be paid for, and ADB set tops. TiVuSat claims it already has 200,000 subscribers.
And free to air satellite TV may yet make it across to the US. SES owns satellite operators SES Astra and SES World Skies and has part ownership in Ciel in Canada and QuetzSat in Mexico, which mostly just supports Dish Mexico. A similar service has already launched in New Zealand as part of the digital terrestrial Freeview effort.