UK digital migration stagnates

New figures released by UK broadcasting and telecoms regulator Ofcom reveal that less than two years before analogue switches off, digital TV has reached more than nine-tenths of households, yet growth is slowing, notes Rapid TV News.

Ofcom's latest Digital TV Progress Report for quarter two of 2010 shows that 92.7% of UK households now own a digital TV, an increase of 2.9% on 2009 but only an increase of 0.7% on the first quarter of 2010.

The survey also revealed that almost 71% of all secondary TV sets had been converted to digital by the end of June 2010, up by 1% in a year but up 16% from two years ago.

ITV has hired Red Bee Media to mange and deliver its video-on-demand (VOD) content on a variety of platforms, including ITV.com, iTunes and Virgin Media, according to Digital Spy.

Each week, Red Bee, which was previously BBC Broadcast, will transcode ITV's broadcast-quality content into VOD and catch up TV formats for distribution on global platforms.

The company will also provide digital workflows of scheduled programmes for ITV's transmission centres, as well as manage more than 10 000 hours of archive ITV content.

Croatia has joined the small but growing number of countries in central and eastern Europe that have completed the transition to digital terrestrial broadcasting, states Balkans.

MPortal reports that the last 'digital region', known as D4, including the capital city of Zagreb, went entirely digital last week, ending a process that began on 26 January this year.

This saw Croatia split into nine 'digital regions', with the first to switch off its analogue transmitters being D5.