It’s all sweetness and light in Pay TV land as the latest batch of financial results came out this week, with AT&T in the US reporting just after we put the last Faultline to bed, and also Ziggo in the Netherlands BSkyB in the UK reported, also with up quarters.
AT&T is mostly about mobile, we know that, but its U-Verse TV and broadband has been incredibly strong for it over the months, keeping fixed line attrition at bay. The company has revenues up to $31.4 billion in the fourth quarter, up 2.1% or $653 million against a year ago. Wireless was up 9.9 percent, so most of the growth was there, with 2.8 million new wireless subscribers, which many people think will be its last quarter of growth for a while, now that it shares the iPhone with Verizon. It says it has 95.5 million wireless subs and has added 8.9 million this past 12 months.
But over at its U-Verse IPTV service it had one of its best quarters ever with 246,000 additions taking it to 3 million in service, compared with Verizon’s 3.5 million announced last week for its FiOS TV service. IP data revenue from residential customers came up to $5.3 billion, a tiny net increase.
AT&T said its U-verse High Speed Internet attach rate was at 90% and 60% also took U-verse Voice so that over 75% of TV subscribers have a triple- or quad-play option from AT&T with ARPU continuing to be high, around $160 a month across these services.
AT&T says that U-verse now reaches 27 million living units and that in areas marketed to for 30 months or more, overall penetration is 22%. AT&T still has 4.9 million TV subs so that means it retains about 1.9 million DTH subscribers across both DirecTV, it’s current partner, and DISH, its old partner.
In broadband AT&T added 210,000 U-Verse connections, most of them at 3 Mbps or higher. U-verse revenues were up 73% year on year and in the fourth quarter were $1.3 billion. VoIP voice through U-Verse reached 726,000 and the company only lost 300,000 fixed lines in the quarter, which must be a record low for the past five years. AT&T also said that it shipped 442,000 iPads and Android-based tablets.
Netherlands largest cable operator Ziggo, which with cable rival (and cellular partner) UPC, controls about 65% of the Netherlands pay TV market, has slipped in terms of total pay TV customers, down 2.5% to 3.09 million from 3.17 million, a fall of around 78,000 homes. Analog homes fell 20.5% to 1.28 million while the transition to digital continued on apace and surged 16.2% to 1.8 million.
Ziggo also has shifted broadband homes to 1.55 million, up 6.9% and telephony to 1.17 million up 16.8%. All of this has happened while it drove up Average Revenue Per User to €33.28 a month, a rise of around 11.2% in a year.
The company said that it has shipped 300,000 digital set tops during the year and digital is now 58.4% of all TV subs. The company also said that customer satisfaction levels improved and will remain a core priority through 2011.
Meanwhile at BSkyB in the UK the satellite DTH supplier finally broke the magic 10 million homes mark, something that it’s been threatening to do for quite a while. It did this with 140,000 net additions for the quarter at a time when it has grown HD subs to 3.5 million, a 68% increase over last year.
Sky also boasted the fastest broadband growth it has had in 10 quarters adding 204,000 homes. This is no doubt set to be further boosted by the purchase of The Cloud, which is now official, which is one of the largest private networks of WiFi hotspots in the country. We assume the broadband deal will be to offer the hotspots free to home broadband customers, but what the company has said publicly is that Sky video content will be viewable online on multiple devices, including portable devices, through the Cloud hotspots. Sky says that 24% of customers now take all three services – TV, broadband and telephony.
Overall revenue was up 15% to £3.2 billion and adjusted operating profit is up 26% to £520 million. The bulk of revenue is from subscription payments with some advertising and service revenue.