Austar profit tumbles
Regional pay TV operator Austar reported a 41 per cent drop in first-half profits yesterday.
- Published by David Knox
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- Filed under Subscription
Regional pay TV operator Austar reported a 41% drop in first-half profits yesterday, to $20.7 million.
Austar had 747,148 subscribers at June 30, having added 3,389 in the second quarter of calendar 2010. In the six months ending on June 30 Austar added 3389 customers, less than half the number expected. Churn also increased despite the introduction of MyStar PVRs.
CEO John Porter backtracked from his prediction at the company’s full-year results in February, when he said he expected subscriber growth in 2010 to be greater than 2009.
“This year has probably not panned out they way I had thought at that time, so I certainly wouldn’t make any prediction that we would outperform 2009,” he said yesterday.
“I would be lying if I didn’t say I was disappointed in the subscriber growth in the first half.
”It looks a lot better for the second half of the year,” Mr Porter said.
Austar’s June sales were its best since March last year.
Source: NineMSN, Sydney Morning Herald
7 Responses
reckon once all the digital channels come in will be worse for them. and from what i see in the tv guide endless repeats of I love Lucy, Gilligan, Hogans Heroes is already on free to air. Never ceases to amaze me that you can’t just pay a flat rate for the channels you want rather than a bundle of shyte including the weather channel. and as for the movie channels. Hello! By the time they are on austar they are in the weekly section of you handy video…ahem… I mean DVD shop and in some cases its cheaper to by the DVD outright.
Most of my mates have it for the kids channels and now mostly watching abc 2 and 3 which costs nada.
Hopefully they continue to perform poorly and Foxtel will buy them out.
The limited package they gave me was Sky News, Fox Sports News, W, 111 Hits, History and Comedy.
What packages did you guys get?
I cancelled pay tv when they started advertising. Yes, quite a few years back now. It was pointless anyway, I have seen all the episodes of Gilligan’s Island that I ever want to see.
In any event, you can’t have it both ways. Yo ucan charge your subscribers, *or* you can sell advertising space. Normal tv gets away with only the latter, there’s no reason other tv cn’t, now that the infrastructure has been paid for many times over.
In the UK they have free to air satellite tv that is paid for by its own advertising.
I tried cancelling my foxtel account a few weeks back(wasn’t that i didn’t want it, it just cost too much for what they offer) and also was offered many different ‘cheaper’ packages to keep me connected and they spent about half an hour talking me out of it but I kept saying ‘no!!!’…a few days later I got a call offering me the pack I was on (platinumhd) for half the price, so I said ok…personally I think the reduced price is about what they should be charging in the first place!!!
If paytv wants more customers they should lower their prices and provide better programming as there are better (less expensive) alternatives around these days. I mean who wants to pay 100+ bucks a month for replays of ‘Judge Judy’ and ‘Mother and Son’????
Wait for a similar turn in results for Foxtel too. I rang up to cancel during the week but was offered a limited package for $10 per month. They may maintain their subscriber numbers but will likely see much reduced revenue from subscribers waivering in interest as new FTA channels satisfy TV needs at home.