Spain has a plan to completely renew DTT. More than half of households cannot comply

In Spain, DTT is on the verge of making the leap to DVB-T2. It is normal that these acronyms sound Chinese to you, so we are going to review the change that our televisions will face after the necessary retuning both to make room for a new channel that is to come, and for the migration to DVB-T2.

The new channel. The BOE has published This weekend the resolution that awards a new television channel to Integrated Television Entertainment Services (SEVEN). The Ministry for Digital Transformation and Public Service awarded last May the license for a new DTT channel for 15 years, renewable to the company managed by Andrés Varela and linked to shareholders of the Prisa group.

The first phase. SEVEN has a maximum period of six months to start its broadcasts, forcing the Secretariat to publish in the coming weeks a resolution with the exact date on which everything will start: the arrival of SEVEN, the retuning and the beginning of the technological migration will occur at the same time.

What is a multiple. Before getting into acronyms, it is worth understanding how DTT works. The channels do not each broadcast on their own, they travel grouped in packages that share the same radio frequency. And those packages are called multiples. In other words, it is as if several channels shared the same highway to reach their destination, your television antenna.

Until now, these multiplexes used the DVB-T (Digital Video Broadcasting – Terrestrial) standard. Its successor, as you may have guessed, is DVB-T2. This new multiple allows up to 68% more data to be transported and, secondly, replaces the H.264 codec with H.265 (HEVC). You may be familiar with these last acronyms, since almost all high-end phones record video by default in H.265: a more advanced codec that requires practically half the data to transmit the same image quality.

What is going to happen and when. The calendar has been in the air since 2024 and, even today, it is not closed. What we know for the project is that this is a two-phase process:

• First phase: he state manifold RGE2shared between RTVE, Atresmedia and Mediaset2, will migrate to the DVB-T2 standard. In addition to the efficiency that we mentioned previously, the migration comes hand in hand with UHD emissions. Devices that do not support the standard will still be able to play HD content.
• Second phase: The definitive move to DVB-T2 marks that all televisions must be compatible with this standard to play content. It is something that, a priori, will take time to arrive. The complete change will not be made until two milestones are achieved: that at least 95% of DTT receivers are compatible with DVB-T2 and that at least 90% of televisions can receive UHD (4K) broadcasts.

Go deeper. In short, Spanish DTT cannot be reorganized or begin the migration to the new standard until the new channel is up and running. This is why the arrival of SEVEN marks a before and after for the beginning of the plan. Nevertheless, according to the latest adoption figuresonly 36.6% of the television fleet is compatible with 4K broadcasts, very far from the 95% set by the Ministry for Digital Transformation and Public Service.

The first phase is at your doorstep and should begin in 2026 according to the established plan, the second will not begin until the general picture changes. Since last year, Spain cannot legally sell a TV that is not compatible with DVB-T2 and that is not UHD ready, although the complete renovation of the park is not expected until after 2030.

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