The continuing costs related to the hacking of its encryption system took Premiere to its fourth consecutive quarterly loss in the third quarter. A negative EBITDA of E27.2 million in Q3 2008 compared to the positive E22m in the same quarter of last year.

Increased costs on transmission, hardware and sales pushed operating costs up to E271.8m, from E225.5m 12 months earlier, as the German pay-TV platform switched encryption to a combination of Nagra and NDS systems. Premiere recently announced that its encryption system was again fully secure.

Premiere is currently negotiating a restructure of its debt following several blows including re-stating profits after admitting its subscriber count had been inaccurate. Under Premiere's revised subscriber accounting method, which has reduced overall subscriber levels to the benefit of average subscriber revenues, Premiere had 2.411 million subs at the end of Q3. ARPU was E23.92.

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