Sky Television slash service entry price
Sky Television has slashed its entry price in a bid to shore-up its customer base.
The pay-television firm would break its ‘‘Sky Basic’’ service into two, giving customers the option to subscribe for a limited set of channels for $24.91 a month.
Extra channels currently included in Sky Basic will cost $25 a month, so there would be no change in the current price of $49.91 a month if customers chose to take all the channels currently offered with Sky Basic.
The new pricing means customers could get a bundle including Sky Sports for $54.81 a month, instead of the current minimum of $79.81, by ditching some news and entertainment channels that were now compulsory in any Sky package.
The change follows an exodus of almost 34,000 satellite subscribers in the year to June.
Sky said in a statement to the NZX that its board and management believed its new pricing structure would help attract new customers by offering ‘‘a cheaper entry point for customers who do not want the full Sky package’’.
But its shares slumped 3.6 per cent to $2.70 when trading opened on the NZX as investors fretted
‘‘The goal was to keep delivering to its "core traditional customers ...’’
John Fellet, Sky chief executive
about the uncertain impact the strategy could have on its future earnings. By 11am its shares had fallen 7 per cent, wiping $70m off the company’s value.
Currently all customers buy a Sky Basic package for $49.91 per month and then added options of Sport, Movies and other premium channels.
Under the new pricing plan, Sky Basic would be replaced with two new packages called Sky Starter and Sky Entertainment. Sky Starter would carry a smaller subset of 46 channels including all the free-to-air channels at a cost of $24.91 per month, while Sky Entertainment would comprise 18 channels – including UKTV, Jones, Living Channel, Discovery, Vibe, CNN and BBC World and Sky News – at a cost of $25 per month.
Sky also announced that customers who continued to buy other products, both Sky Starter and Sky Entertainment as well as either Sky Sport or Movies, would receive its premium drama channel SoHo at no extra cost.
Sky chief executive John Fellet said its goal was to keep delivering to its ‘‘core traditional customers who enjoy linear channels, love MySky and are increasingly connecting their boxes to their home WiFi and accessing our On Demand content’’, while building better products and services that appealed to other customers.