BARB News

The BARB Establishment Survey provides data on the ownership of television equipment within, and demographic composition of, UK households. The data are used as a base for projecting universes and provide targets for panel control and weighting. The survey is carried out continuously across a sample of approximately 52,500 households annually.

Main results from the survey are published in annual reports. These are available to all BARB subscribers and can be downloaded in pdf format from the BARB website. Chart 1 shows the proportion of television households owning one, two and three or more sets. Growth in ‘multi-set' homes has slowed in recent years but there has still been a noticeable increase in the proportion of homes with three or more sets, to 27.6% in 2007, up from 21.4% ten years previously.

Chart 1: Proportion of TV Households with 1/2/3+ TV Sets

More detailed analysis of Establishment Survey data can be carried out via electronic data files, published quarterly. These enable analysis at the level of Individuals, Households and TV sets. Examples of an analysis of TV sets are shown in Charts 2 and 3.

Chart 2: Location of TV Sets

The vast majority of main TV sets within the household are located in the main living room but the rise in multi-set homes means that sets are increasingly found in other rooms as well. As a result, as Chart 2 shows, main living room sets now represent less than half of the total TV sets found in private homes and there are a large number of secondary sets in other locations. As digital switchover progresses it will be interesting to see how many of these secondary sets are converted to receive digital.

Chart 3 shows the dramatic growth that has already taken place in digital sets over the past three years. It shows the proportion of sets able to receive digital, by the location of the set in the home. Averaged across October 2006 to September 2007, results from the Establishment Survey showed that 51% of all sets received digital, up from 29% in the equivalent period three years before. Over the same period, 73% of main living room sets received digital and it is hardly surprising that these sets would tend be the first within a home to go digital. In other rooms a much lower proportion of sets were digital but in all cases there had been substantial growth across the three year period.

Chart 3: Proportion of TV Sets Receiving Digital