Still only one in three Finnish households have digital TV decoders

Pace of purchasing has increased this year, but insufficient for 2007 launch

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A total of 785,000 digital television decoders of various types had been acquired by Finnish households by the end of August. This means that around 33 % of Finnish homes are prepared for digital television transmissions.
      The information is based on a quarterly survey by Finnpanel involving questionnaires sent to 3,000 randomly chosen households in Finland. The survey covers all decoders for antenna, cable, and satellite reception, as well as all digital televisions in the country. The reported margin of error was +/-2.5 percentage points.
     
Close to 600,000 decoders have been acquired for antenna reception. A total of 154,000 homes are equipped with digital decoders for cable reception, whereas the number of households with digital adapters for satellite reception is only 76,000.
      The number of households equipped with slots for pay-TV receiver cards is 488,000. A total of 134,000 homes already have more than one digital decoder.
      According to the survey, the sales of digital decoders have picked up this year, and they are currently double the numbers recorded last year. An average of over 30,000 households per month are now buying the devices.
     
Finland is to shut down analog television transmissions entirely in 2007. At the current rate, only two-thirds of Finns will be ready when digital television takes over in August 2007.
      In an interview with Helsingin Sanomat three weeks ago, Minister of Transport and Communications Susanna Huovinen (SDP) regarded it as possible that the government could give financial support to the poorest families who wish to acquire a digital decoder.
      Her argument was that the TV licence and daily newspaper subscription of the most impoverished citizens are already now paid out of their subsistence subsidy. According to Huovinen, the TV licence alone is worth nothing without a decoder, once analog television transmissions have been shut down.
      In the period from August to September, an average of 19 % of all television viewing in Finland consisted of digital broadcasts. The majority of the viewing involved watching domestic channels that were transmitted in both formats - analog and digital.


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Pay-TV operators making concerted bid for "underdeveloped" Finnish market (16.9.2005)
  Pay-TV channels invade Finland; free digital adapters with new subscriptions (21.4.2005)
  One in four households have digital TV decoders (15.4.2005)
  Anticlimactic start for digital television in Finland (28.8.2001)

Helsingin Sanomat