HD Boosts Sky’s Profit, Limits Churn

Sky TV’s reluctance to add HD channels in the short term seems at odds with its latest profit results.

In a shareholders statement, chief executive John Fellet attributes a 19% jump in net profit,  to $50.8 million, for the six months ending December 31, to uptake of its MySky HDi.

He also reported churn of 13.8%, with Sky losing fewer HDi customers than SD subscribers, and revealed Sky was considering a 3D channel only weeks after telling ScreenScribe.tv it was too soon to consider such a possibility.

Sky also needs to think about upgrading its MySky HDi service so subscribers can archive content from the paltry 300GB hard drive to an external hard drive via USB, as you can with TiVo, or offer a MySky HDi 2 with two-to-three times the storage (as Britain’s Sky did last month).

Meanwhile, HD fans frustrated with Sky’s slow roll-out of HD compared with what’s happening across the Tasman should read what an Aussie scribe has to say about dealing with Foxtel and Telstra.