£12m Investment Brightens LineOne’s Future

The future of struggling internet service provider (ISP), LineOne, has been secured with a £12 million cash injection from its two remaining owners, United News & Media (UNM) and BT. News International was a third partner in the original venture, but pulled out last month as it launched its own free ISP, CurrantBun.com (see The Sun Serves Up CurrantBun).

Previously a subscription service, LineOne recently rebranded itself as a free service, following the market trend toward fully-free ISPs. The company also recently made a substantial part of its workforce redundant (see News International Expected To Launch Free ISP Services). Since becoming free, LineOne claims to have been attracting 10,000 new customers per week and now has over 150,000 users.

The £12 million investment will be used to drive new content and promote the service through UNM’s broadcasting and publishing interests, which include the two Express newspapers.

Malcolm Wall, chief executive of United Broadcasting & Entertainment, says: “LineOne is already poised to announce some very significant partnering deals over the next few weeks that will further drive the expansion we are already experiencing. Clearly we will be building on United’s media assets and businesses, offering a combined potential audience of 10 million in the UK alone.”

LineOne currently boasts 1.8 million pages of content for its users. Some of these pages are provided by News International papers The Times and Sunday Times. NI is to continue to provide content from these papers indefinitely; the Sun and News Of The World have both withdrawn from LineOne’s pages.

United News & Media: 0171 921 5000 BT: 0171 356 5369 LineOne: www.lineone.net