Digital TV in Poland

The introduction of a digital TV service aims at providing subscribers with a more diversified portfolio of channels and services and will result in improved signal reception as well as the elimination of interference. New possibilities of interactive television will become available, for example sending e-mail, browsing web pages, and many other added services. The European Broadcasting Union expects digital TV to be available in 60% of EU households in 2012, while in Poland it will be 25%. If it is so, then it is digital TV more than the Internet that will become a platform for accessing information and telecommunications & data services for a larger number of people. Always open to technological novelties, Poles bought 1.5 million state-of-the-art plasma and LCD HDTV-compatible TV sets in 2007.

The digital signal is planned to be enabled in Poland already in mid-2008, following a testing phase. Initially, channels are to be broadcast both in digital and analogue form. The European Commission has set the deadline for the final replacement of analogue broadcasting with digital transmission to 2012. However, the Polish government has negotiated postponing that to 2015, taking into account the financial situation of a certain group of society for whom modern TV equipment could not be affordable.