Advanced Television

BT Vision creeps up, group profit crumbles

February 13, 2009

UK telco BT has revealed that it has garnered 398,000 subscribers for its IPTV service ‘BT Vision’ in the fourth quarter of 2008, up from 340,000 subscribers at the end of the previous quarter. The group also saw an increasing number of its new customers subscribing to one or more of its on-demand programming packages.

BT also added 83,000 broadband subscribers in the fourth quarter of last year, taking its total number of retail broadband customers to 4.7 million in the UK. But BT profit of £113 million (E124.6m) in the last quarter of 2008 is 81 percent down on the year before despite five percent better revenue of £5.43 billion. The problmes are mainly in its ailing overseas corporate networks division, which has a pre-announced £336 million one-off charge. Total revenue across all operations for the fourth quarter of 2008 reached £5.437 billion, up 5 per cent year-on-year.

CEO Ian Livingstone: "Three of our businesses performed ahead of expectations in the quarter and the group, excluding global services, delivered the best year on year profit growth for five years."

Categories: Articles, IPTV, OTT