80% watch free-to-air during prime time - Irvine

Freeview claims it is now being used by than a million New Zealanders to watch free-to-air TV.

General manager Sam Irvine said the milestone is a huge achievement for Freeview and proves the free to air platform has a central place in the future of New Zealand TV.

Mr Irvine's comments were aimed at Sky TVNZ and TVNZ's new platform - dubbed 'Igloo' and due to be announced December 7  and launch next year - which will combine a free-to-air Freeview feed with up to 12 paid premium channels. If leaks are correct, subscriptions will start at $25 per month.

According to Sky TV chief executive John Fellet, Igloo will have an encrypted signal, meaning today's Freeview set-top boxes and TV tuners will not be able to receive its signal. Igloo will also take a terrestrial feed and be fibre-ready, setting it apart from satellite-feed MySky HDi decoders. In other words, it seems Igloo will need a whole set-top box.

“Freeview continues to enjoy the strongest growth of any digital TV broadcasting platform. We’ve gone from being in zero percent of Kiwi households to close to 30 percent in just five years,” Mr Irvine said.

Freeview’s latest sales figures show more than half a million of New Zealand’s 1.6 million households were receiving Freeview free to air digital TV. As at the end of October 536,350 homes using Freeview for their television viewing and in total there are 792,878 homes who now have a Freeview device.

“There’s an average of 2.4 people in each household, so our figure of one million viewers is conservative,” says Mr Irvine.

Hi-def, standard-def breakdown
A spokesman told NBR the overall ration of Freeview HD (high definition digital terrestrial) to Freeview SD (standard definitional digital satellite) connections was roughly 2:1.

"So using the figures in the release we get 178,783 SD households and 357,567 HD households."

Mr Irvine told NBR that "Freeview HD is growing at about six times the rate of Freeview satellite. This is because the price of the Freeview HD receivers, either built into almost all TV's now, or as a stand alone box plugged into an existing TV, continues to reduce."

At its recent annual result, Sky TV said its total number of subscribers had increasedby 27,000  to 829,000.

As of June, the number of Sky TV subscribers with MySky HDi decoders was 279,875 - well behind Freeview's claimed HD total of 357,567.

Triangulation
Sky TV contends while many TVs ship with Freeview tuners, their owners ignore the feature, instead hooking their set to a MySkyHDi decoder.

Asked to explain how Freeview worked out how many households were using Freeview, the spokesman said the government's latest Colmar Brunton Digital Tracker survey was "triangulated with figures from GFK, an independent group which monitors retail sales. The latter is used to filter out the homes which have Freeview devices but are not using them to watch TV (that is, Sky homes).

Most watch free-to-air during prime time
Freeview's Mr Irvine also pushed the theme of free-to-air channels dominating prime time ratings. TV ratings from Neilsen TAM show 80% of all audiences, or 1,227,000 people watch free-to-air channels between 6pm and 10.30pm.

Free to air TV also attracted the lion’s share of audiences for the Rugby World Cup final, with 1.4 million or 68% of all viewers. 

The analogue to digital TV switchover will take place between September next year and the end of 2013 on the following schedule:

• Hawke’s Bay and the West Coast - 30 September 2012
• the rest of the South Island – 30 April 2013;
• the Lower North Island, including Taranaki and East Cape – 29 September 2013;
• the Upper North Island – 1 December 2013.

Once a region goes digital, all viewers will have to move to Sky TV or Freeview (or, now it seems, the Sky TV-TVNZ hybrid Igloo).

The government-subsidised Freeview is backed by TVNZ, MediaWorks and other free-to-air broadcasters.