Carphone Warehouse has today announced that they have successfully acquired the TV, broadband and home phone provider Tiscali.
The deal, worth £236m, will propel Carphone’s TalkTalk brand into becoming Britain’s largest consumer broadband provider with 4.25 million customers, covering over 25% of UK households.
What will come as a huge relief to worried Tiscali customers is the fact that their services will remain uninterrupted during the closing stages of the acquisition deal and beyond. There will be no new forms to sign and your Tiscali email address will stay the same!
What will change is the fact that this will make Sky and Virgin start looking over their shoulders…
Up until now, TalkTalk have only offered a two tier attack on the market – Broadband and home phone. With the purchase of Tiscali, TalkTalk not only obtain their customer base but they also obtain their infrastructure, which includes digital TV.
Sky and Virgin Media are the major players in the market place if you are looking for a triple bundle but, with the aggressive nature of TalkTalks broadband and home phone offerings, one can only assume that they will attack the profitable digital TV market in the same manner.
Tiscali has (finally) been sold.
As we are always saying here at Simplifydigital, there are major savings to be made by bundling your services so, if you’re an existing customer of TalkTalk for broadband and phone and they were to offer a digital TV service down the line, it would make total sense to take up all three services with them.
The only facet that would be holding TalkTalk back from launching a ‘digital TV’ attack on both Sky and Virgin Media is the fact that their digital TV service would be offered through an ADSL infrastructure (your phone line). Sky, who supplies their service through a satellite dish and Virgin Media, who offer theirs through fibre optic cable, can offer more TV channels and also offer HD content, which, according to the latest HD customer sign up figures, is in demand more than ever.
All of this means that there will be more competition in the market which will only drive better deals so, this isn’t just a major coup for Carphone Warehouse it’s also a great result for the end consumer, whether you belong to Tiscali or not.