Sky customers spending more than £400 a year Sky has announced its figures for the first three months of 2007, and things are looking rosy. Critically, the ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) is up to £406 per year (from £394 over the last quarter) - very good news for Sky, which also saw customer numbers rise by 51,000 to just under 8.5 million. High Definition has been …
"Sky could do with some good news right now. It's been a rough week for the company, with Virgin, Ofcom, and the Office of Fair Trading all accusing it of abusing its dominant position"
And the good news is that by (allegedly) abusing its dominant position, it's managed to up its ARPU to over £400 !
Nice to know that since what punters are paying for Sky is creeping closer to four times the TV license, it's nice to actually see some figures on what a Sky-dominated TV market would actually cost the viewer. 400 quid a year for crap like Lost and 24? Hmm...sounds like a deal to me!
I was an early adopter of Sky Digital and Sky+, and I pre-ordered Sky HD, however, when the demo boxes were released I took one look at the line up and picture quality, cancelled my order and haven't looked back.
Why?
For £10 extra a month, there's no content, and the quality's poor. In fact, the only channel worth having HD for is free - BBC HD. All the other HD channels show the same stuff on repeat. And soon you'll be able to get BBC HD for free on the BBC's Freesat Service.
And for movies? Just buy a cheapy HD-DVD add-on for an XBox or buy a PS3 and use BluRay and watch the movies in better quality (1080p) than the Sky HD service (720p/1080i) which still suffers IMHO from awful artefacts and pixellation due to limited bandwidth. Agreed, it's better than it was, but it's still bad.
I'd rather pay four hundred for something I want than one hundred for something I don't! Sky must be raking it in since they're getting that much from their customers and advertising revenue on top. Of course that's tailed off a bit since the Virgin incident...
I haven't tried Sky HD myself though I've heard bad things. Just looking at what's on offer it doesn't seem like you get very much for your tenner.
I have been a Sky HD customer since launch, and agree that there does need to be more content, and there will be in time and as demand increases - but I have to say that once you have watched Premiership Footie in HD, there really is no going back to "nornal" telly. This is worth every penny of the £10 per month to have HD. Also, the HD box looks cool, is fast and can store an unbelieveable amount of recorded content on the 160GB space they give you. So unless you have actually lived with HD for a while, you won't know what you're missing.
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