5 million analogue subscribers to digital

Today at the Palais des Congrès, audiovisual French will celebrate the success of the digital terrestrial television (DTT), which will blow his first candle. The popularity is measured by household equipment. The bar of the 2 million DTT receivers has been largely exceeded, including a very large majority adapters and nearly 100,000 TVs incorporating the TNT. We must also add the mixed boxes of Canal , to receive the free TNT. At the end of April, the unit will be deployed in 600,000. For the coming years, sales of adapters should continue at a slower pace, but the relay should be taken by the TVs with integrated DTT (nearly $ 1 million should be sold in 2006) and by the will of Canal to quickly migrate its 2.5 million analogue subscribers to digital.

The success is then measured by the interest of the public, not only for digital reception quality, but for the increase in the number of free channels. With the arrival of DTT, viewers could finally receive the channel M6 in a satisfactory manner, see a meeting of football in digital quality on TF1, and access to two channels (iTélé and BFM TV), a string for children (Gulli), three musical strings (NRJ 12, W9 and Europe 2 TV) or a minigénéraliste as TMC.

The "digital dividend".

Within a year, free digital terrestrial television has already revolutionized the French audiovisual landscape. She firstly pushed marriage two bouquets of television revenue, Canal and GST. It is also redistribute the cards in terms of hearing.

Today, the more absolute blur is maintained on the hearing of these chains, without a precise measurement tool and adopted by all. Specifically, Hertzian historical chains are measured on a daily basis by the Médiamat, other news such as NRJ 12, NT1, TMC, W9, Gulli and BFM TV agreed to specific measures of hearing in their universe of reception with results daily or quarterly, some of the DTT free as iTélé are measured on the semi-annual Médiacabsat, others finally as Direct 8, Europe 2 TVFrance 4 are based on instantaneous measurement tools of the ADSL TV Free or nine Cegetel. To make things, the Committee Audimétrie of Médiamétrie admitted two representatives of the new DTT channels, Emmanuelle Guilbart (Gulli) and Alain Weill (BFM TV). Each agrees to run, with the generalization of the TNT, all strings will be compared on the same basis. But no one has interest to do so currently. Some major historical chains, the hearing appears to be low in a universe expanded, or some new channels, wishing not to expose their confidential hearing.

In the future, the real revolution made by digital terrestrial television will be the generalisation of digital to all French households and, therefore, the extinction of the analog signal. This will release multiple frequencies, the famous "digital dividend". It is the great challenge of the next five years. The deployment of DTT transmitters plan should cover 85 of the population in 2007. To achieve 100, a satellite coverage is under study. Two solutions are either TNT channels negotiate their direct satellite recovery they negotiate with a bouquet of pay television (Canal or GST) for the distribution of free channels. Irony of history, are now free DTT channels as the locomotive for pay television.