Brussels, 11/03/2013 (Agence Europe) - According to the latest Yearbook published on 11 March by the European Audiovisual Observatory, which analyses the audiovisual landscape in 39 European countries every year, 22 European Union member states switched over to digital terrestrial television (DTT) in 2012. The EU had recommended the end of analogue terrestrial broadcasting for 2012.
Since publication of the previous Yearbook, six additional EU member countries have abandoned analogue terrestrial broadcasting and respected the timeframes set - Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Portugal, the Slovak Republic and the United Kingdom. Elsewhere in Europe, Croatia, Switzerland, Norway and Iceland have also abandoned analogue terrestrial television, bringing to 26 the number of the 39 member countries of the Observatory having completed the transition. In the other countries, 2013 should be the year of abandoning analogue terrestrial television for Greece, Poland and Bulgaria. And 2014 should be the year for this for Hungary (as well as the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina). Albania, Romania, Russia, Montenegro and Turkey plan to complete the process in 2015. If these objectives are achieved, these countries will have respected the June 2015 deadline fixed by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).
The report also gives the following information: (1) decrease in subscriptions to pay-DTT services: for the first time in 2012, the number of subscriptions to pay-DTT dropped by an overall figure of 13%. The most greatly affected country was Italy. At the end of 2012, DTT pay-TV platforms had been established in 21 countries, with a total of 33 pay-DTT services available; (2) increase in local and high definition (HD) channels on DTT networks: at the end of 2012, the EU had 456 free national or international channels, 529 pay channels and over 1,000 local and regional channels. In 2012, 86 new terrestrial channels were launched (compared to 56 in 2011 and 50 in 2010). Many of these were local channels launched in Denmark or the United Kingdom. The report highlights a growing number of HD services on DTT platforms; (3) the television market remains robust with 369 new channels launched in the EU in 2012, and over 40% of these broadcast in HD. The growth of the HD channels has had a major impact on the overall growth of the market. While 143 channels were closed down in the EU in 2011, only 62 ceased their activity in 2012; (4) the European television market as a whole consists of more than 11,000 European channels, of which 8,270 are established in the EU. Of the 11,000 available channels, 51% are regional or local and 49% are national or international channels; (5) sport is still the top genre available: taking into account the television channels available in Europe (on all the platforms) - excluding local and regional channels - the most predominant genres are sport, followed by entertainment channels, generalist channels and film channels. In the HD universe, the most important genre is sport (20%), followed by film channels (16%). (IL/transl.fl)