Multichannel News reports:
DirecTV delivered its best quarterly subscriber growth in three years, adding 301,000 net U.S. subscribers in the last three months of 2008, while net income for the quarter dropped 5%.
Revenue for the quarter ended Dec. 31 was $5.31 billion, up 9% year over year, and earnings per share increased 7% to $0.32 compared with the same period last year.
The satellite operator's 301,000 net adds in the U.S. -- giving it 17.621 million subs at the close of 2008 -- blew past analyst expectations; Sanford Bernstein had projected 214,600 net subscriber additions for the quarter. Analyst consensus estimates were earnings of 34 cents per share, though quarterly revenue was in line with expectations...
Is it possible this may help FNL?
Hard to know. If some measurable portion of the 301K can be attributed to FNL versus say, NFL Sunday Ticket and just normal growth, it seems like DirecTV would certainly be more willing to write another check to NBC. But since we know zero real details, including how much DirecTV wrote a check for it’s hard to even speculate.
It seems to me this would mostly be attributed to the digital transition.
I wouldn’t doubt that the NFL Network has at least a little to do with it. The Net is on DirecTV’s base package, on Dish Network you need to upgrade your package. It didn’t used to be like that, but as i’ve learned over the years, Dish Network really likes screwing things up.
Julia, I agree with you on this one. DirecTV is offering nice base package discounts to draw in the “converter box people.” Plus, they’ve been marketing their exclusive features (like FNL), which I believe is available on the base package? Once they lure in the subscribers, they can push all the sports and premium packages for just a few dollars more
.
I wonder which cable companies, if any, are seeing similar increases?
I too think that the DTV switch has to be a factor in the increase. I will keep an eye out for cable MSO numbers. We used to post them regularly, but stopped when there wasn’t much interest.