‘I want my ITV’ says Murdoch

Satdude

‘I want my ITV’ says Murdoch

BSkyB says firmly that it wants to hold onto its ITV stake. James Murdoch also hinted that DTT service Picnic could offer HDTV.

BSkyB CEO James Murdoch, speaking at Morgan Stanley’s Telecoms & Media conference in Barcelona, says Sky wants to hold onto its “valuable” 17.9% stake in ITV. Murdoch said BSkyB wants to remain a core shareholder in the “great franchise” that ITV was and added that “we are confident about our investment position.”

Murdoch described Sky’s position as having good momentum in a “very dynamic environment” in Britain. He described his rationale behind the ITV investment as being focused on all aspects of ITV, not least its production abilities and “unique” position in the free-to-air market in the UK.

A few hours later ITV’s CEO Michael Grade, speaking at the same event, admitted that he’d like to see the back of Sky. Grade said: “I would prefer not to have it (BSkyB) on our shareholder register.”

As to “Picnic”, BSkyB’s proposed digital terrestrial service which plans to use Sky’s DTT frequences, transform them into MPEG4 signals, and sell the channels as pay-TV, Murdoch said: “Picnic is a great opportunity to take a sector that we have access to on the DTT platform and turn it into something that is much more exciting. It would move the [existing] platform to a more advanced technology that would allow high definition, and in MPEG4. This gives us more capacity to put more channels through and we think this is the [route] for a pay model alongside a wider offering of broadband, and television.”

BSkyB CFO Jeremy Darroch, in his financial presentation, predicted that BSkyB’s goal was to hit a “mid to high 20’s” of pay-TV operating margin during 2010, and to widen further beyond 2010. It is currently 22%, explained Darroch, which is up from 17% back in 2004.

James Murdoch said Sky’s broadband progress was impressive, and its telephony offering was now gaining real traction. He put up a chart that showed British Telecom’s losses over the past three quarters (-100,000, -165,000, and -223,000) with significant gains for Sky in the three matching quarters (+132,000, +171,000 and +153,000). The other major success of the past few years was Sky+, and Murdoch said that 43% of Sky+ customers were also multi-room clients, adding to ARPU revenues, compared to an average five per cent for a standard TV customer.

Regards Satdude.