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Irish Sky subscribers approach 250,000
Wednesday, July 31 2002
by Andrew McLindon


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.