[opendtv] Re: Australia DTV
- From: Craig Birkmaier <craig@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 25 Nov 2006 09:06:58 -0500
At 3:15 PM -0500 11/24/06, Albert Manfredi wrote:
Can you get an idea of how popular multichannel services are down
under? Do your relatives subscribe to any such service? Do they find
it an unnecessary expense?
According to Astra and other sources:
http://www.astra.org.au/article.asp?section=2&option=1&content=1
As at Quarter 2 2006 1,728,800 homes out of a total of 7,313,000
homes were subscribing to subscription television. With a typical
subscription television home having an average of 3.12 residents, the
industry has a viewing potential of nearly 5 and a half million
Australians (ie 5,401,200 out of a total of 19,447,000 people). From
a household perspective this equates to 23.6% penetration and from a
people perspective this means a 27.8% penetration. Source: OzTAM
Establishment Survey Q2, 2006.
And From:
http://www.budde.com.au/Reports/Contents/Australia-Digital-TV-Market-Overview-and-Statistics-133.html
Digital Free-to-Air (FTA) TV has been held up in a vicious cycle
since it was launched in 2001. Available digital content has been
nowhere near sufficient to help drive sales of digital receivers. By
mid 2006, penetration of digital TVs (digital receivers or digital
integrated TVs) stood at only 20% of Australian households, which
still classifies digital TV as a niche medium. However, sales of
digital TVs in Australian homes finally started to take hold in 2005
and the first half of 2006 and this trend will continue into 2007 as
prices for LCD and plasma TVs continue to drop to more affordable
prices. This report provides detailed statistics on a wide range of
areas including adoption rates of digital TV by type of device,
household penetration of digital media as well as consumer surveys on
digital TV adoption.
Looks like things have reached the tipping point down under. The
Digital TV share has incresed from 20% to 30% in one year, and it did
this with little more than digital versions of what is available via
the Analog FTA service.
Historically, the multichannel market in Australia has been limited,
as has been the case in most European nations. When DTV was
authorized, Foxtel et al lobbied successfully to prohibit
multicasting.In this respect Australia is not much different than the
U.S. - i.e. techno-politics has the upper hand over market-based
competition. One can only imagine what the DTV penetration would be
in Australia now, had multicasting been permitted.
Here is the beginning of an article on the subject...
AUSTRALIA: Digital TV's key question is one of multiple choice
Multichannelling ban would give monopoly to Foxtel, Seven argued
The Age
Friday, March 24, 2006
By Helen Westerman
Major media players successfully lobbied to keep in place a ban on
multichannelling of free-to-air television stations with claims that
lifting the ban would damage local production of news and drama,
documents newly released have revealed.
But that argument was dismissed by the Seven Network, which strongly
supported lifting the multichannelling ban by saying that it would
have no significant impact on existing free-to-air or pay television
services in Australia.
The Seven Network also argued that failure to permit multichannelling
would entrench Foxtel, which is jointly owned by PBL, Telstra and
News Limited, as a monopoly pay tv operator and compromise the
digital platform.
http://www.asiamedia.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=41370
Hope this is what you were looking for Bert.
Regards
Craig
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