2010 was a year destined to be remembered as one of the most important in the long history of Italian television. This is demonstrated by four particularly significant things:

• with the completion of the switch-off of analogue terrestrial broadcasts all over northern Italy, apart from Liguria, almost 65% of Italians have now switched permanently to digital television;

• the comprehensive dissemination of digital television platforms (digital terrestrial, satellite and Iptv) has far exceeded 80%;

• use of decoders/digital televisions has now bypassed that of the traditional analogue terrestrial system;

• the television audience has reached the highest level ever, thanks to the expansion of the offering available to the public and particularly that of free digital terrestrial television, with over 9.8 million average daily viewers and a daily viewing time per-capita of more than four hours.

Despite the growing competition of digital media, television shows evident signs of vitality and strength which enable it to confirm, once again, its central role in the information and entertainment system.

2010 was also positive in terms of advertising revenues: according to the estimates of Nielsen Media Research, good growth (+6%) was recorded, enabling television media to recover about half the drop in advertising investments recorded between 2008 and 2009 due to the economic crisis. As mentioned, the switchover to DDT was the main cause of discontinuity, capable of generating the most significant structural changes in the competitive layout of the market. According to the Auditel figures, the dissemination of DDT exceeded 75% at the end of 2010 (with an absolute value of 18.7 million households) and in December, fruition through this platform reached almost 60%, making it the system used most by Italian viewers to watch television.

The offering available on the platform, particularly in terms of free viewing, was further strengthened thanks to the launch of new specialized broadcasters. The comprehensive share of digital terrestrial channels doubled during 2010, reaching about 15% of the whole day in the month of December.

The offering of pay-tv was also consolidated, gaining considerable increases in terms of dissemination with households, income from direct customer spending and advertising revenues, becoming even more competitive with respect to Sky. The satellite platform is substantially stable. After about six months of a slight, but progressive decline in the user base, the pay operator, Sky, began growing again, closing the year with over 4.8 million customers (about 200,000 of which are business users), with a growth of about 130,000 units (+3%) compared with the end of 2009.



The inversion in trend recorded in the second half of the year is due, among other things, to the operator's aggressive commercial policies to make the bouquet more competitive in terms of pricing and technological services (e.g.: My Sky HD decoder).

As regards the free satellite offering, the Tivù Sat platform managed as a joint venture by Rai, Mediaset and Telecom Italia Media and launched in 2009 with the aim of guaranteeing full access to the free offering by those people without coverage by the digital terrestrial broadcasting infrastructure, performed very well.

Tivù Sat closed the year with almost 800,000 smart cards activated, showing a clear increase compared to the end of 2009.

The IPTV platforms managed by the telephone operators Fastweb, Telecom Italia and Infostrada, continue to remain stably widespread (estimated use by about 600,000 households) at substantially marginal values.

While migration to digital televisions definitely represents the main factor of short/medium-term discontinuity for the television market, the long-term situation will probably be characterized by the development of landline and mobile broadband structures and by the growing offer of innovative content and services accessible through convergent devices capable of combining several technologies and functions.

On this front too, 2010 was a very important year for the definitive consolidation of certain trends (e.g.: online video consumption and the success of so-called "catch up tv" series) , the acceleration of state-of-theart smartphone sales, the launch of tablet pcs and the marketing of television devices (e.g.: screens, decoders, blue ray players) equipped with Internet connections and therefore able to allow users access to interactive services and audio-visual content on demand.

These phenomena are inevitably destined to have even greater effects on the market layouts, because they encourage formidable boosts towards the innovation of business and offering models and are capable of opening up the doors of business television to new players, including those outside the editorial sector.

In response to this, Rai has strengthened its role, taking on the challenges posed by digital TV and proposing:

• a new idea of Public Service, capable of exploiting the multichannel opportunities of the new technology and placing itself at the service of the public to an even greater extent;

• an offering without equal, such as to simultaneously satisfy the specific demands of the country's whole creative and industrial system.