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HD drives Foxtel revenue

Customer uptake of High Definition services on the IQ2 is driving Foxtel, which reported a 17.5% growth in earnings.

New Foxtel subscriptions may have slowed in the current climate but company revenue for the year ended 30 June 2010 was up nearly 10% to just over $2b.

Foxtel today announced a 17.5% growth in earnings (EBITDA) to $477m for the year to 30 June 2010.

The Pay TV giant is seeing strong uptake of the Foxtel iQ2 with High Definition, including current customers adding the service. Together with iQ, combined penetration is now at 63%, and 36% of subscribers are taking Multi-Room.

Foxtel has over 1.54m direct subscriber households (including the installation queue), up 3% on the same time last year. Total subscriber households is 1.632m. Churn, the number of cancellations, is at 13.5% for the full year, around the same for the year prior.

“We continued to invest and innovate including broadcasting in February the most comprehensive Olympics coverage in Australia’s broadcasting history with the Vancouver Olympic Winter Games as well as launching Foxtel Next Generation,” CEO Kim Williams said.

33 Responses

  1. Jellyman, unless they triple the number of HD channels overnight, you won’t see any of those. This isn’t me denying you what you want, I don’t run Foxtel so I have no say, I’m just telling you what I think is reality.

    Personally I think the iQ2 should be the standard box, and then almost every channel can be HD with the amount of bandwidth they’d save by not needing to transmit SD versions. And the really unpopular/unnecessary channels can be stuck onto one TP in SD, and they’d be able to fit 30 of them onto a single transponder and still have them looking better than the current SD channels.

    Josh, every one of us will have their own priorities for HD, but Foxtel will add whatever they want to add. I think ESPN should be 2 HD channels, and some of the others to look at should be Sci Fi, BBC Knowledge, TV1, Arena. And they should ditch the useless Discovery World HD (such a shame… it’s such a pretty channel, with absolute rubbish content), and replacec it with an HD simulcast of the main channel, plus Science and Health in HD.

    And also agree about Movie Extra. Who knows why they went with a timeshift (Starpics 2) instead of Extra.

  2. I read an article in The Age regarding the AFL broadcast rights a couple of months ago, and it mentioned ESPN (I doubt they could be a serious challenger for AFL rights, but they seem to think otherwise) wanting in on the action, and it mentioned that they planned to expand their Australian lineup to 3 channels. It didn’t elaborate on what those would be, or when, but at least they’re thinking about it.

  3. lol, well hopefully we both get what we want.

    as noted, their financial results are very good, and are skewing towards hd, so it bodes well.

    problem is, they can only fit 5, max 6 hd channels per transponder, so the hd channels are more expensive to broadcast. notice how the ha fta’s aren’t up there? that would take at least 2 transponders just for the east coast states.

  4. @ Ararat – I have to 100% agree with you about ESPN. In the U.S. ESPN is the leader for sport, with FOX Sports only used for local coverage, and it is such a shame that in Aust. it is a speck compared to FOX Sports. Especially seems though Australia is the only country outside the U.S. to have ESPN 3D and yet they wont give us the channels that have 24/7 coverage. Like ESPN seriously connect the dots…the country is good enough to have ESPN 3D but not your other more popular sister channels…not exactly making a lot of sense.
    I apologise for misunderstanding your point about the holes in the HD line-up. I again 100% agree with you cause there is a large amount of channels that need to have HD simulcasts. Off the top of my head I would want TV1, Arena, 13th Street, Universal Channel, Movie Extra, Fuel TV, History Channel, Nat Geo Wild, and Nat Geo Advanture. Again thats just off the top of my head so if i actually went through and looked at the channels that had HD content and would be worth while i could most probably add another 20.
    Regarding SPEED I am with you on the fact that it should be made HD, but I believe it will preform fine as there are multiple car racing tournaments around the world which are shown on the U.S. version, and it not only shows the races but also has talkshows (similar to the AFL and NRL ones on FOX Sports) aswell as shows doco’s and movies regarding automotives. Also I Believe the rights to those races only last a couple of years so they will be able to bet for them once ONE HD’s rights expire.
    @ Ararat and Jellyman – regarding the kids/family channels, I believe Australia needs them in SD, but in Australia’s current position we have too many channels that have large portions of programming in HD that need a HD channel before SD channels that have little HD content. Sorry Jellyman I am agreeing that Australia is behind and that we need the channels, but in our current position I dont want them in HD

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