TV Vlaanderen ends DVB-T2 service due to declining interest: What’s next for Antenne TV customers?

In Flanders, the last supplier of DVB-T2, digital terrestrial television, will disappear at the end of August. TV Vlaanderen has informed its Antenne TV customers that the service is ending “due to declining interest”.

“Due to declining interest in watching TV via DVB-T and the rapid development of other streaming methods, we are saying goodbye to Antenna TV. 5 years after the launch, the number of Antenne TV customers is not enough to justify further necessary investments,” said the email received by Antenne TV customers today.

“TV VLAANDEREN’s television offer has evolved more in recent years and, in addition to satellite TV, we have been offering a comprehensive streaming TV product, APP TV, for over 3 years . This streaming product allows us to offer much more content for the same price, such as video on demand from CANAL+ and Belgian football through DAZN Eleven. This is why Antenne TV will no longer be available from 1 September 2024.

In December 2017, TV Vlaanderen launched the Antenne TV formula, where you can get a basic package of 15 (commercial) channels via a DVB-T decoder and a regular old-fashioned TV antenna for a monthly subscription of just under 10 euros. The VRT also had its own DVB-T (open) network at the time.

TV Vlaanderen is part of the French Canal + Group, which is itself part of Vivendi. TV Vlaanderen leased the private DVB-T channels for Antenne TV that the Flemish government gave to Norkring (as the sole bidder) in 2009. In general, these are channels 43 and 46 for Flemish Brabant, East Flanders and the West and channels 44 and 47 for Antwerp and Limburg. (click on twenty).

As a RadioVisie reader you may remember that the controversial – later withdrawn by the VRM – national channel 10, in band III for DAB+, was also part of that frequency package, although that channel was never leased for commercial use.

Previously, between 2012 and 2014, Telenet leased the DVB-T channels from Norkring with the ‘Teletenne’ formulabut Telenet, who needed to protect their cable subscriptions, deliberately marketed that service at such a high price that the product was going to move.

For the operator of the channel Norkring, which recently lost the operation of the commercial DAB+ mux 11A (Flanders 1) to Broadcast Partners, this is again a huge commercial hit. It now only operates the DAB+ mux 5A/5D in the Flemish broadcasting sector. So the question is how do you go about this.

In the e-mail sent out, TV Vlaanderen offers some formulas for changing to TV via satellite or TV via the internet for free, but we will not go into to that further here. Antenne TV is no longer found on the TV Vlaanderen website.

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