SES’s HD+ service passes 2m customers in Germany

SES’s satellite TV offering HD+ passed the two million subscribers mark in Germany last year, according to company stats.

SES said that the service had some 2.11 subscribers as of December 31, 2016, up 15% year-on-year.

On top of this, SES said there are currently 850,000 households in the free HD+ test phase, bringing the total number of households using HD+ to almost three million.

“2016 was a great year for HD+, cracking the two million subscriber mark and growing even stronger than in the previous year,” said Wilfried Urner, chairman of the management board of HD+.

“This momentum confirms that HD+ is now a real force in the German TV landscape. More and more people in Germany are willing to pay for a better television experience, whether in terms of content choice or picture quality. HD+, as one of the pioneers of HDTV, is benefiting from this trend.

“HD+ will be banking on further stimulus through the rising trend in Ultra-HD and the switch over of the current digital terrestrial television DVB-T to DVB-T2.”

Germany’s digital terrestrial network is due to be switched from DVB-T to the new DVB-T2 transmission standard on March 29. This includes a switch to HEVC encoding.

SES claims that for DVB-T households that will need new hardware following this switch, the combination of satellite reception and HD+ will offer an “attractive alternative”.