02/04/2009

The television market in the 27 Member States of the European Union, plus Croatia and Turke, is continually expanding. Currently totaling 5,587 channels, including 200 new channels launched in 2008, the market also witnessed significant developments in digital terrestrial television (DTT) last year.

The trend was revealed by recent data from MAVISE, a database developed by the European Audiovisual Observatory for the Directorate General Communication of the European Commission.

Countries such as Belgium, Germany, Finland, Luxembourg, Netherlands and Sweden have already ceased analogue terrestrial transmission, while France, Italy, Spain and the UK (four markets with great terrestrial television use) have reached very high levels of DTT penetration in households.

The market is expected to develop more rapidly this year with the upcoming launch of new services in Slovenia, Denmark, Portugal, Ireland, Poland, Greece, and Slovakia.

Of the types of channels available on the DTT platforms (by genre), there is a significantly higher percentage of generalist, news, business and cultural channels. There is a lower channel capacity on DTT platforms in comparison to satellite or cable, which has probably led to a clearly higher focus on making more public service, generalist and news and cultural content available.

Specialist channels such as sports, cinema and children’s content are still significant, but other niche channels are much less prominent on the DTT platforms: home shopping, adult channels, weather, religious, minority interest, and so forth.

There is also a difference in smaller and larger markets in terms of the number of national and international channels available. Larger countries such as Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the UK have significantly more national and regional channels. Smaller countries such as Estonia, Lithuania and Malta currently rely on international channels for almost 50% of their DTT content.