Cable And Satellite Industry Round-Up 1997

1997 saw another year of growth in the number of homes able to receive a cable service and by the 1^st October broadband cable services had become available to over 10 million homes in the UK according to ITC figures. Over 2.2 million broadband homes now receive a cable TV service, which gives it a penetration rate of 21.8%. This is an increase of 0.6% on the same period last year. Cable & Wireless Communications are the market leaders as cable providers with 698,370 homes connected to their services.

Satellite is still ahead of cable in the subscription wars and according to BARB dish estimates, 3.9 million homes are now subscribing to BSkyB. This represents 257,000 new subscribers to satellite over the year. However, BARB estimates that cable subscriptions have actually grown almost twice as much as satellite since January with an estimated 552,000 new subscribers. It remains to be seen whether cable will ever overtake satellite and the battle will be made more interesting this year with the launch of both satellite and terrestrial digital TV services. Including SMATV connections, BARB estimate that there are now 6.48 million subscribers to non-terrestrial TV services.

BARB Dish Estimates (000’s)

The programming services available have also seen strong growth over the last year with over 10 new stations being launched. At the end of the year BSkyB launched its Pay Per View Movie channel, Sky Box Office. In a joint venture between BBC and Flextech, 3 new channels were launched in November under the umbrella of UKTV.

The channels, UK Style, UK Arena and UK Horizons are cable exclusive, due to lack of space on satellite carriage and all pull their programming from recent BBC archives. However, there is a taster channel, UKTV Preview available on Astra, showing strands from all 3 channels. Two new natural history channels were launched around the same time, National Geographic Channel (a joint venture with BskyB) and Animal Planet (Discovery Communications).

The news stations had a market shake-up with trouble for Sky News caused by the continued threat of being taken off cable packages. EBN merged into CNBC to create a strong business and news channel after making losses and BBC News 24 launched in November, though it remains to be seen what sort of impact this channel will have on its rivals.

Meanwhile, farewells were bid to several channels, including Sky Two, the supplementary channel to Sky One. Granada Talk TV also bit the bullet and the GSkyB package was rebranded as Granada Goodlife with the previously separate channels including Food & Wine, Health & Beauty and Home & Garden losing their individual station branding.

November 1997 saw an important data release, with the first figures available from the Barb Astra Panel for Broadband cable homes. This includes data for Live TV, Carlton Select and The Box which had, hitherto, not been included in Astra reports. The weekly viewing summary, week end 30/11/97, saw Live TV attain an average Daily Reach of 9.0% and Carlton Select receive a Daily Reach of 2.3%.

Broadband Cable Report Weekly Viewing Summary W/E 30/11/97

1998 looks to be an exciting time for cable & satellite with new channels in the pipeline including a travel channel from Flextech while Emap are set to launch a sister music channel to the Box. An avalanche of channels are also mooted to be launching as part of digital TV.

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