Freesat doubles number of Freetime customers

UK free-to-air satellite operator Freesat has doubled the number customers to its connected Freetime service. 

The connected TV offering gained twice the number of new customers in the first quarter of 2015 compared with the same period in 2014 and now accounts for 50% of all Freesat set-top box sales for the fourth consecutive quarter, according to Freesat.

The Freetime service is available on TVs and set-top boxes and includes features such as pause, rewind and record, a seven-day roll-back TV guide and a range of catch up players including BBC iPlayer, ITV Player, Channel 4’s All4 and Channel 5’s Demand 5.

Announcing a “solid start to 2015” Freesat also said that its mobile app had also now exceeded 500,000 downloads within the first year of its launch, with the rollout of the Freesat app for Kindle users driving demand in Q1.

In total, Freesat added 12,000 new Freesat homes added during the first quarter. The satellite TV service is now used in 1.9 million households and is watched by four million viewers every week.

Freesat’s managing director, Alistair Thom, said that the addition of Viacom’s Spike to its channel line-up last month shows that Freesat is continuing to support an “ever expanding content offering.”

“Our efforts with the Free TV Alliance are also progressing as we work towards creating a common set of specifications and open standards. The Free TV Alliance can develop features comparable to Pay TV for manufacturers to readily adopt. Ultimately, we see an exciting opportunity for Freesat to engage commercially on an international scale,” said Thom.