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Sky has increased the number of Irish subscribers to its digital service to 245,000 and plans to introduce interactive services in Ireland before the end of the year.
Figures released by British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB) on Wednesday showed that for the three months to the end of June the total number of digital subscribers in Ireland was up by 13,000 from the previous quarter to 245,000. This, the company said, meant it maintained growth rates of approximately 1,000 digital subscribers per week.
However, the number of people viewing Sky channels via cable and MMDS actually fell by 5,000 from the previous quarter to 605,000, and was down year-on-year by 16,000. A spokesperson for Sky said that the drop was probably due to the Sky platform increasingly becoming "a viable alternative" to cable thanks to the recent addition of terrestrial channels such as BBC1, BBC2, RTE1 and Network 2 to its digital offering.
Overall, the total number of Sky direct-to-home (DTH) satellite subscribers in the UK and Ireland was 6.1 million at the end of June 2002. This was a net increase of 214,000 from the previous quarter and a rise of 648,000 over the year. Digital churn for the year was 10.5 percent.
The total amount of UK and Ireland subscribers to one or more of Sky's channels was up by 148,000 to 10.2 million in the year. Sky said that this increase was greater than the loss of subscribers from the closure of ITV Digital.
Sky is now planning for the introduction of interactive services in Ireland. Mark Deering, director of Sky Ireland, told ElectricNews.Net that interactive services will be available to Sky subscribers here in the last quarter of this year. These services will include e-mail, betting, games and SMS services and should provide Sky in Ireland with a source of strong revenue.
In the UK, Sky's interactive revenues in its latest financial year, which end June 30 2002, were up 100 percent from the previous year to STG186 million. Of this total, STG95 million was related to betting via interactive television, the Internet and the telephone. Surrey Sports, which is Sky's wholly owned bookmaker, now has 93,000 interactive TV bettering registrations and receives over 60,000 bets per week on average.
The majority of the remaining STG91 million in revenues was from Sky Active and subsidy recovery revenues. Interactive ARPU, which includes only the net margin from betting, for Sky's latest quarter was STG14, an increase of 29 percent on the same quarter a year ago.
However, gaming costs in the year increased by STG13 million to STG88 million. This, said Sky, was due to the increased number of interactive bets following the introduction of the service in December 2000 and the re-launch of Surrey Sports in November 2001.
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