The UK’s Freesat said this week that it now has 600,000 subscribers. That’s a 200,000 leap since May when it announced 400,000 customers after the first 12 months of its existence.
Freesat is a free to air satellite TV service which uses the same satellite as BSkyB, and which initially promised it would have 200 TV channels, many of them HD. It has come close, and now boasts 140 channels, with some of them HD, but that’s still an awful lot more than the digital terrestrial Freeview service and that has managed to grab over 10 million households.
Back in April public figures revealed that Freesat was growing at about 125,000 a quarter and this has now risen to around 150,000 (since the 200,000 came about in 4 months). By comparison hybrid Freeview VoD service BT Vision has only managed to attract 443,000 customers since launching almost three years ago.
Emma Scott, Managing Director of Freesat comments;
To achieve this level of sales and viewing in such a short space of time is a fantastic achievement and testament to the ever-growing appeal of Freesat, both to consumers and broadcasters.
We’ve had a brilliant summer and are confident that we’ll continue to report outstanding growth, especially in the run up to the World Cup as we attract viewers that want to watch in high definition but without having to pay a subscription no matter where they live in the UK.
If this constitutes a trend then the more recently launched free satellite services in countries like France, Italy and New Zealand, will also take off, putting more and more pressure on other countries to adopt free to air, especially where advertising is sufficiently strong, such as in the US.