Swisscom grows TV customer base by 21%

Swiss telco Swisscom grew its TV customer base by 21% year-on-year in the second quarter, helped in part by the April launch of its Swisscom TV 2.0 offering.

The firm reported 1.09 million TV customers for the quarter after adding 39,000 subscribers.

In the first half of the year, Swisscom TV customer numbers grew by 91,000, while on an annual basis it added a total of 189,000 TV customers.

“Swisscom TV 2.0 was launched at the beginning of April 2014 and offers a number of extended features. By the end of June, it had already attracted 77,000 customers, most of whom had upgraded from a previous Swisscom offering,” the firm said.

Swisscom’s TV 2.0 offering includes a cloud-based recording feature that lets users record any number of programmes in parallel and access the recordings on a variety of devices. Its ‘Replay’ feature was also extended from 30 hours to seven days.

In the first half of 2014, Swisscom’s net revenue increased by 1.9% year-on-year to CHF5.7 billion (€4.7 billion). EBITDA rose 3.8% to CHF2.182 billion.

“Our business has shown a very pleasing development over the first half of the year. Revenue and operating income continued to grow. We were able to set important benchmarks on the market over recent months thanks to a large number of innovations, including the launch of Swisscom TV 2.0, the Docsafe cloud service and LTE Advanced,” said Swisscom CEO Urs Schaeppi.