While the big news for BT this week is its involvement with new streaming gaming paradigm OnLive (see separate story) local investors were focused on its results, out the day after our last issue went to bed. This heralded a return to profit after a disastrous 2008 and a year of cost-cutting and write downs in 2009.
From our point of view the other highlight is what is going on at its BT Vision IPTV service ‘ it was at 451,000 users last quarter after three years of sales, some considerable distance behind its early hopes of 3 millions subscribers, and now it has only jumped 16,000 new subs to 467,000 during its fourth quarter to 31 March 2010.
BT says that it will not only keep going with TV, with what many see as an ill-conceived strategy, but that it will plow more money into the service, some £200 million it says, in order to strengthen it. One move is that it has signed up the two Sky Sports channels for the service after regulator Ofcom forced satellite TV operators BSkyB, to lower the wholesale price of what are seen as dominant sports channels. The new channels will be introduced in time for the new Premier League soccer season, which will get under way in August.
It will also add international sports channel ESPN, owned by Disney, and charge customers less than £20 per month for the sports option. BT Vision is a hybrid platform, with VoD only going over broadband, and broadcast digital terrestrial TV (DVB-T) going free to air. Interestingly the new sports channels will all go ‘paid to air’ and BT has booked space on an Arqiva managed transmitter multiplex for the channels, which presumably will use the existing Microsoft DRM, which is already used with BT Vision services.
BT is also supposed to be part of the new Project Canvas platform, initiated by the BBC, which allows set tops to offer similar hybrid services to those in BT Vision. It’s not yet known if BT will simply use this as a way of offloading the provision of set tops to retail Canvas boxes, or if new TV services will also come when it adopts Canvas.