Spark beefs up Lightbox offering
Spark will beef up its internet television service Lightbox in April by adding on-demand movies and a ‘‘premium’’ option that will let customers watch its TV shows offline when travelling.
The changes mean its 300,000 subscribers – many of whom get the service free of charge with Spark broadband or a mobile plan – and ‘‘casual visitors’’ will be able to rent movies online.
Shares in the country’s biggest telecommunications company closed down almost 4 per cent at $3.32 yesterday after it reported a small drop in its interim profit and signalled that it might miss its forecast for the full year.
Spark reported a 3.4 per cent fall in its profit for the six months ended December 31, to $172 million. Revenues for the period edged up 1.6 per cent to $1.82 billion.
Managing director Simon Moutter and chairwoman Justine Smyth reaffirmed their forecast that Spark would grow its operating profit for the full year by between zero and 2 per cent.
But they cautioned that could change if they decided to accelerate Spark’s ‘‘business transformation’’ to strengthen its result next year.
Lightbox general manager Hema Patel said the ‘‘premium’’ service would let customers download any of the television content available on Lightbox to a mobile device, so they could view it offline when they were travelling away from home.
‘‘Spark customers on eligible mobile and broadband plans will continue to get a standard Lightbox subscription included in their plan – or can choose to pay a small top-up charge to access the premium subscription,’’ the company explained.
The move into on-demand movies follows the announcement of a similar service, Stuff Pix, by a joint venture partly owned by Stuff, which is also expected to launch by April.
Both companies have said they will start with ‘‘hundreds’’ of movies and add films once they become available in what used to be known as the DVD release window, about three to four months after films first appear in cinemas.
At that point, movies are distributed on a non-exclusive basis, and both Moutter and Stuff Pix chief executive Paddy Buckley assumed there would be some overlap in the titles available through the two services.
Spark was committed to becoming the lowest-cost operator in the telecoms industry through ‘‘simplification, automation and digitisation initiatives’’, Moutter and Smyth said in a statement.
Moutter could not forecast what that might mean in terms of jobs but said Spark had to reduce costs if it was to continue to invest in technologies ‘‘while maintaining the high-quality experience our customers rightly expect’’.
‘‘In 2015 we got down to about
5000 staff, from well over 8000 in
2012. That rose back up and we peaked at 6000 in March 2017 . . .
‘‘We have now drifted down to a little over 5600 and we’d expect [that] to continue to decline as automation and digitisation initiatives roll out.’’
Spark said it had developed 35 software routines or ‘‘bots’’ to automate ‘‘sometimes very complex tasks’’, from managing security to resolving broadband faults and matching fibre broadband orders with its smaller fibre service providers.
It was now looking at using a software development methodology called Agile across its business to speed up changes.