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Freeview has 10.3m homes it doesn’t share with Sky or Virgin

Freeview is the only TV choice for more than 10 million British homes, and shares more than 8.5m homes with Sky or Virgin Media.

Sky is the only TV choice in 2.7m homes, while only 249,000 of us are hooked up exclusively to Virgin Media’s TV service.

Not surprisingly, there are 8.8m British households where TV screens are used for both Freeview and either Sky or Virgin, with 54 per cent of the UK paying for TV on top of the Licence Fee.

Freeview has 10.3m homes it doesn’t share with Sky or Virgin
Freeview: first and only TV choice for more than 10m British homes

Remarkably, there are also half a million homes with both Sky and Virgin (that’s expensive viewing), and 13,000 with Sky, Virgin and Freeview – what are they afraid to miss?

Ofcom has released a snapshot of the preferred TV platforms for the UK’s 25.1m digital TV homes at the end of 2012 in its latest Digital TV Update.

Sadly for those who like to follow the British TV industry, it’s the last time they’ll collect the data very quarter, following the completion of Digital Switchover in 2012.

The TV market was static in 2012, with no change in the percentage of homes paying for Sky (37 per cent) or Virgin Media (13 per cent).

Yet 2013 could see the start of a change, with YouView launching, both as a standalone retail offer and a pay-TV service with BT and TalkTalk broadband subscriptions.

The new arrival is keen to steal customers from Sky, Virgin and Freeview, as are mention Lovefilm, Netflix and other on-demand broadband services.

From now on, we’ll have to rely on the individual quarterly reports to their shareholders of Sky, Virgin, BT and TalkTalk, and the more opaque trickle of take-up data from Freesat, Freeview and YouView, along with Ofcom’s vast annual Communications Market Report, and its other technology tracking data.

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