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BT Sport attracts 2m sign-ups

October 31, 2013

BT-SportBT has reported that more than two million customers are now signed up to its BT Sport TV service, which it launched in August this year to compete with Sky Sports.

BT saw six-month pre-tax profits of £948 million (€1.16bn), a fall of 13 per cent from the same period in 2012.

Gavin Patterson, Chief Executive Officer, commenting on the results, said: “These are good results, with growth in earnings per share and free cash flow.”

“This has been our strongest ever quarter for fibre take-up with Openreach net connections up 70 per cent. Our fibre network now passes more than 17 million premises. It is open to all and many other service providers have now got behind it.”

“BT Sport has made a confident start and is already delivering for viewers. More than two million of our customers are signed up to it and our wholesale contract with Virgin Media means it is available to around four million homes in total. It is also delivering for the business, helping us achieve a record 93 per cent share of broadband net adds in the quarter, our lowest line losses for five years and 4 per cent revenue growth in our BT Retail Consumer business.”

“BT Retail’s Business division again saw good growth in IT services while BT Global Services and BT Wholesale both generated strong order books.”

BT now has a total of 900,000 television customers – still some way behind Virgin’s 3.8 million and Sky’s 10.5 million

BT added that profits slipped because of the sports investment. However, the company saw 156,000 new broadband additions in the single quarter to the end of September. That is up from 81,000 for the same period in 2012.

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