Television or TV is part of the daily life of Portuguese households. A household may have several means of access to receive the television signal. ANACOM releases the report “Meios de acesso ao sinal de TVhttps://www.anacom.pt/render.jsp?contentId=1736129” (Means of access to the TV signal), which results from a set of questions on means of access to the TV signal put forward by ANACOM and integrated and collected by Instituto Nacional de Estatistica (INE - the National Statistics Institute) in the “Survey on the use of Information and Communication Technologies by families”, conducted between June and August 2022.
In 2022, the pay-TV (PTV) signal distribution service was the main means of access to the TV signal in families’ main residences (87.9%). Digital terrestrial television (DTT), which allows watching national general-interest channels live and free of charge, was used by 38.6% of households, not necessarily on an exclusive basis.
Around 10% of households had secondary residences, and half of them reported having some DTT access in those residences (50.8%). If main residences and households with secondary residences are considered, it is estimated that about 40% had access to the TV signal through DTT. It should be noted that this value is higher than the one recorded in 2016 (32%).
In 2022, there were 2.3 million TV sets with access to DTT, 90% in primary residences and 10% in secondary residences. On average, each family had 1.6 TV sets with access to DTT at their usual residence and 1.3 TV sets at secondary residences.
The proportion of households with DTT access in their homes increased by 5.3 percentage points (p.p.) over the last four years (33.3% in 2018 and 38.6% in 2022), and most of them had the pay-TV service at the same time (75.6% or 29.2% of all households).
The exclusive use of DTT in main residences covered 9% of households, 6.3 p.p. less than in 2018 (15.3%) while 5.5% had no fixed electronic communications service. The use of DTT by households varies with geographic location, both in main residences, inversely to what was observed with PTV, and in secondary residences.
As regards main residences, DTT penetration exceeded the national average in the Centre (44%), North (43%) and Alentejo (41%) regions, while the penetration of PTV exceeded the national average in the remaining four regions (Autonomous Regions, Lisbon Metropolitan Area and, to a lesser extent, the Algarve). As far as secondary residences are concerned, DTT penetration in these households exceeded 50% in the regions of the Lisbon Metropolitan Area (55%) and Alentejo (54%).
Family typology and household income influence the means of access to the TV signal used. Families with children and with higher income tend to record higher penetration of PTV. On the other hand, families without children and families with lower income show higher DTT penetration rates. Larger families, with or without children, tend to have a higher combined use of PTV and DTT.
