SATELLITE BROADCASTER British Sky Broadcasting yesterday played down a move into the red, resulting from writedowns on its 17.9 per cent stake in rival broadcaster ITV, as it pleased investors with improved revenues from its customer base of nearly nine million subscribers in the third quarter.

Sky Ireland added 13,000 new customers in the quarter to the end of March and now has 548,000 subscribers. This is a slower rate of growth than the previous quarter when the broadcaster added 22,000 customers.

Sky Ireland claimed that the number of Sky digital customers was equivalent to over a third of all households and that it was adding 1,000 new customers a week.

When Ireland and Britain are combined, British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB) added 56,000 digital satellite subscribers in the quarter to reach 8.88 million. The equivalent growth rate for the three months to the end of December was 167,000 new customers.

Revenue for the nine months to March 31st increased 10 per cent on the comparable period to £3.7 billion (€5.22 billion) with operating profits of £504 million (€709 million).

Revenues for the quarter were £1.25 billion but after impairments on investment in ITV, pretax profit for the quarter fell from £200 million to £56 million and the company recorded a loss after tax of £6 million. Quarterly losses per share were 0.3p (earnings of 8.1p).

The overall churn rate, which measures the number of customers leaving BSkyB, was 10.5 per cent in the third quarter, lower than the 13.7 per cent in the year-ago period, although higher than 10.0 per cent seen in the second quarter.

New customer additions fell to 289,000 from 340,000 in the same period last year as the company reduced its discount packages and began charging for installation. - (Financial Times service)