Ofcom figures indicate there are over 900,000 households with a free satellite TV service in the UK.

“The Communications Market: Digital Progress Report for the second quarter of 2008 shows around 840,000 homes were using free satellite - from BSkyB, BBC/ITV or other retailers - on their main television set. This was an increase of around 120,000 on the previous quarter,” said Ofcom.

“In addition, between June and September BBC/ITV freesat sold a further 60,000 units, meaning that the total number of households using a free satellite service is now around 900,000,” said the industry regulator. 

It also claims that 88% of households have digital TV on their main set. “The second quarter of 2008 showed that households remain focussed on switching their secondary television sets to digital as well,” said Ofcom. “19.1 million of the 35 million secondary sets have now been converted to digital.”

Key statistics for the second quarter of 2008 include, said Ofcom: the total number of households with digital TV (DTT) reached 16.7 million, more than two million DTT devices were sold, and integrated digital televisions (IDTV) accounted for 1.4 million, almost two-thirds of all DTT sales - with IDTV sales up by 54 per cent on the year.

In pay-TV over satellite, BSkyB grew its UK and Ireland subscriber base by 92,000 to 8.9 million households, an increase of 398,000 over the past 12 months.
Virgin Media now has over 3.5 million cable subscribers in total, up by almost 24,000 in the second quarter of this year.