Sky TV to put prices on pause
Sky Television appears to be skipping an annual price rise for its satellite television service this year, in the wake of subscriber losses.
The pay-television company annoyed some sports fans this month when it slashed its ‘‘Fan Pass’’ service that lets non-subscribers watch Sky Sports online.
It withdrew its daily and weekly Fan Pass options and increased the cost of monthly passes from $59.99 to $99.99 a month.
May is usually the month when Sky writes to customers to advise them of price hikes for its satellite television service.
But spokeswoman Kirsty Way said it had no prices changes planned.
It is understood that if it were now to make any changes, they would take months to implement.
Last May, the company put up the cost of Sky Basic by 69 cents to $49.91, and the price of Sky Sports by $1.61 to $29.90, citing increased content costs for sports rights in particular.
The price pause comes as Sky battles business headwinds.
In February, Sky announced its interim profit had fallen by almost a third as it lost 36,000 subscribers.
The proportion of revenues that it spent buying-in programmes jumped sharply from 34 per cent to 39 per cent.
Forsyth Barr analyst Blair Galpin, said Sky needed to look at its strategy and could consider cutting prices.
But that would not be a simple fix for the challenges it was facing, he said.
Fellow analyst Morningstar said last year that Sky should consider ‘‘biting the bullet’’ by cutting the price of Sky Basic.
Analyst Brian Han said in a new research note on Friday, that ‘‘technology-savvy consumers’’ were likely to become more demanding and less willing to pay for traditional channel bundles.