Annual Cable & Satellite Round-Up – 2000

Penetration of broadband services reached 26.5% by October 2000, up 1.4 percentage points. The year was marked by a period of consolidation within the industry as the field was narrowed to just two contenders: NTL and Telewest Communications.

NTL’s £8bn merger with Cable & Wireless Communications (see NTL Spends £8.2bn On Cable & Wireless Communications) was given the go-ahead from the government (see Government Clears NTL/CWC Merger) and completed in time for NTL to soar ahead of its rival in terms of its subscriber base in the fourth quarter, when it inherited CWC customers.

NTL finally rolled out its digital television services in May last year (see NTL Launches Digital Cable Services) and managed to achieve its year-end target of 500,000 subscribers ahead of schedule (see NTL Reaches Half Million Target). Telewest was less fortunate, as the summer brought set top box supply problems (see Telewest Puts Digital Strategy On Hold As Box Shortage Affects Cable Industry) which forced it to suspend marketing activities. Even with the problems resolved, the company had to revise its target date for gaining 500,000 subscribers from the year end to the end of the first quarter of 2001 (see Telewest Hopes For Comeback With Cut-Price Digital Package).

Before the CWC merger was cleared, NTL and Telewest had been neck and neck throughout the year in terms of homes connected. Following completion of the merger, Telewest now stands a long way behind NTL on this front, with 1.2m compared to NTL’s 2.2m. However, while NTL maintained a higher penetration rate than Telewest throughout the year, following the merger this has slipped from just over 30% to 28.2%, while Telewest managed to achieve 25.7%.

In terms of homes passed Telewest enjoyed a lead of over 1m during the first three quarters of the year. Inevitably this was lost after the CWC merger, which left NTL with a total of 7.8m homes passed, well ahead of Telewest’s 4.5m

BARB estimates put the total number of multi-channel homes by December 2000 at 8.7m, an increase of 16% on the December 1999 total of 7.5m. The number of satellite homes had increased to 5.2m, a figure which includes digital satellite homes, while the number of cable homes now stands at 3.5m. BSkyB, which has made determined effort this year to convert as many of its existing analogue satellite customers to its digital services managed to sign up 5 million subscribers by the end of the year (see BSkyB Hits Digital Target But Losses Grow).

Note: As of 31 May 2000 all Telewest’s individual franchises were revoked, to be replaced with a non-exclusive local delivery service licence. A similar situation occurred with NTL from 31 December 1999. As a consequence, and in anticipation of similar steps being taken for the remaining franchises in the near future, data for individual franchise areas is no longer published and will no longer appear in MediaTel’s Cable and Satellite database.

ITC measurement of narrowband cable services ceased from July 2000 onwards.

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