Sky announced today that they have more than doubled the number of homes receiving its high definition TV (HDTV) service in the last year. There are now over 1 million Sky+HD homes after record sales of Sky+HD in the first three months of 2009.
HDTV has been a key strategic push for Sky over the past couple of years and the bet seems to be paying off. Whilst Virgin Media have chosen to push their video on demand (VOD) credentials, Sky have chosen the HDTV path as the quickest route to viewers’ hearts (and wallets).
In addition Sky+ PVR functionality is now in over 5 million homes, almost a fifth of all UK TV households. Sky+ is equally as revolutionary as HDTV and allows means viewers can pause and rewind live TV, record a whole series at the touch of a button and record two programmes at the same time.
Sky now has 33 HDTV channels across all genres and have reduced the Sky+HD box price to just £49 to make it the default box of choice for new Sky TV customers. As a result the number of Sky+HD customers grew by 243,000 in the first three months of 2009. By 31 March 2009, the total number of Sky+HD customers stood at 1.022m, up from 465,000 a year earlier.
Sky+HD claims that viewers have access to up to 400 hours of HDTV programming per day – or 12,000 hours a month, which they claim is 50 times more than the nearest competitor.
The figures announced today show that overall Sky has over 9.3 million customers, with 80,000 new customers joining in the first three months of the year. Of the 9.3 million, 2.1 million take Sky Broadband and 1.7 million are Sky Talk customers.
The battle for broadband customers is likely to hot up when the future of Tiscali is decided in the next few days. Indications are that Carphone Warehouse are likely to buy the distressed company, which would make Carphone Warehouse the biggest UK broadband provider between TalkTalk, AOL Broadband and Tiscali.