British satellite broadcaster Sky said that the number of subscribers to Sky Digital in the Republic rose an annual 18 per cent, the biggest increase in four years, after the company introduced movie downloads and the Republic's first high-definition television service.
The number of Sky Digital customers climbed 64,000 to 427,000 in the year ended June 30th, while its cable subscribers climbed to 604,000 from 585,000 a year earlier, parent company British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB) said yesterday.
The gain reaffirmed Sky's position as the number one provider of digital TV services in the Republic, with 30 per cent of the estimated 1.42 million Irish households with TVs now subscribing to the service.
The total number of digital satellite subscribers in the UK and the Republic climbed to 8.2 million. Sky, Ireland's second-largest pay TV company after the operator of NTL and Chorus, attributed increases in customer numbers to new services such as movie downloads and Sky Mobile TV.
The broadcaster aims to attract more Irish customers over the coming months with exclusive coverage of the Ryder Cup golf tournament and Heineken Cup rugby matches.
The organisation said that earlier this month, it plans to introduce a broadband service to the Republic within the next year. It expects to offer a fixed-line broadband product via local exchanges owned by Eircom, and will either launch its own service or acquire a local operator.
BSkyB, which is 38 per cent owned by Rupert Murdoch's media conglomerate News Corp, is counting on high-definition television and its new broadband service to boost customer numbers across the company to 10 million by 2010.
It expects about one-third of those customers to be broadband clients.
The Isleworth, England-based company said yesterday that full-year pretax profit advanced 1 per cent to £798 million (€1.16 billion), meeting analysts' forecasts. BSkyB also reiterated that it was on track to reach earnings expectations this year, despite an expensive entry into the competitive broadband markets in the UK and Ireland.
Annual revenue rose to £4.15 billion from £3.84 billion, after BSkyB raised prices for most customers.
Shares of BSkyB rose 14 pence, or 2.6 per cent, to 564 pence in London yesterday.
The stock has climbed 14 per cent this year, giving the company a market value of £10.1 billion.
