There is not much hard evidence that the UK Freesat experiment is going to take off in the same way that Freeview, the free to air DVB-T service did, which has now sold 30 million set tops and TV sets in just six years, but there is some evidence.
UK regulator Ofcom added free satellite TV figures to its usual quarterly announcement of digital TV customers, which are compiled for it by European researcher GfK, citing it as having reached 720,000 UK homes out of total TV homes of 25.3 million. But the past quarter, during which Freesat became available showed an increase of 80,000 new free to air satellite homes, and given that it has taken around ten years to acquire most of those customers ‘ made up of people tuning in to other free to air satellite services around the world, one channel at a time ‘ we reckon that Freesat may have been responsible for some 60,000 of those new free to air satellite customers.
The service really has not been available for all of that quarter and there have been acute device shortages ‘ the set tops from the Alba group which owns the Bush, Goodmans and Grundig brands had picture quality problems leaving only one Panasonic Plasma TV set on the market ‘ so the chances are that the quarterly rate, when it is finally cited, might go as high as 100,000 a quarter straight away.
New devices are expected by the end of the year from Sony, Samsung and Toshiba and a second wave of products are expected from Humax, Alba and Panasonic by early next year.
These are the typical problems that you get when a group of channel owners take an initiative, and a group of suppliers and retailers are wooed and the marketing is really not a single cogent story. But it was the same in 2002 when Freeview was launched, and that has stimulated a huge wave of DVB-T activity, not all of it free to air, across all of Europe and beyond. Much of it rests on the original model stimulated by the BBC, with its partners BSkyB and network operator National Grid Wireless, which ran the first Multiplexes after ITV’s OnDigital had gone bankrupt. That initial success gave the confidence for France, Spain, Italy and others to make the leap into DVB-T digital terrestrial broadcast technology, which has now spread to almost 40 countries world wide.
But DVB-T multiplexes typically have 6 digital TV channels where there use to be one, in 8MHz of spectrum, usually in VHF and UHF spectrum. Freesat, more in keeping with the way a major satellite DTH supplier like BSkyB works, is capable of lots of HD channels, and as many as 200 channels, which the company says it will reach by Christmas this year.
If Freesat acquires customers at the rate of 100,000 a quarter when no-one has heard of it, at a time when there are only one or two devices for it, and when there are just a handful of channels, only one HD, transmitted, then what will happen when everyone has a neighbour that has it, and it has 200 TV channels, about 25% of which are HD, and when every consumer electronics manufacturer supports it.
Freesat is a free to air advertising supported service, which leases transponder space initially on Eutelsat and later expected on SES Astra which are some of the same satellites which rival pay TV operator Sky uses. Given that Sky actually is a member of Freesat, it also competes with the service while supporting it. The reason for that is because most homes have a satellite dish through Sky, and if the company is not careful those almost 9 million homes may trade down from a monthly fee of some $65 upwards to paying zero, and using the existing installed equipment.
Already France has a Free to air satellite plan called TNT Sat coming out of the same disparate group that runs the Freeview styled French TNT DTT service, which is second only to Freeview, with over 8 million homes using it. Italy is now planning a similar service, and given the requirement for TV services to support HD, the only way a free to air service is going to offer HD to a large number of channels, is using a satellite. However this leaves the prospect of Freesat styled products (supporting some encrypted pay TV as well) halting pay TV take up across Europe once they pick up speed, in the one to two years time frame ‘ and more equipment, better advertising and wider selection of TV, become available.
And that the only thing that may go wrong is that take-up is slower than hoped for and that channels fail to drift onto the service, hence our fascination with ANY evidence of Freesat take up.
By comparison Ofcom reported three million new Freeview devices over the same quarter which represents an annual rise of 55%, with the bulk represented by DVB-T integrated TV sets. However these were mostly in existing Freeview homes.
By comparison with these numbers BSkyB the pay satellite service, grew its subscriber base by just 43,000 in the quarter and cable operator Virgin Media added around 37,000 net new subscribers, which means that Freesat may already be growing faster than any pay TV service in the country
IPTV in the UK, in such a vibrant TV community, is represented only by BT Vision (Freeview which also gives VoD over broadband ) which rose to 214,000 homes over the past 12 months, with 94,000 of these during the past quarter and Tiscali TV acquired from Homechoice, which remains on 50,000 households roughly, unchanged
Freesat this week announced the addition of 18 new free-to-air satellite TV channels and radio stations to its electronic programme guide, including Zone Horror, Zone Reality, Netplay TV, TWC Fight Russia Today, Shop On TV, Gala TV, Gems TV, Inspiration TV and Pitch World. There is an update virtually every week on new channels and next week new radio stations will include Capital FM, Xfm, Classic FM and NME Radio.