SingTel aims to break StarHub’s cable TV hold
Its mio TV offers Hollywood movies at same time as DVD release
By SIOW LI SEN
SINGAPORE Telecommunications yesterday unveiled its pay-TV with a big bang - and vowed to break the dominance of rival StarHub which has been offering cable TV since 1995.
‘We change the game and offer choice, flexibility’
SingTel’s service starts today with several firsts in an effort to end StarHub’s monopoly. But will it turn Singaporeans on?
SingTel Singapore chief executive Allen Lew said that its ‘mio TV’ will offer the island’s first Cantonese movie channel, blockbuster Hollywood movies at the same time as their DVD release and total flexibility in price plans.
And mio TV will be cheaper than StarHub, he said. The basic monthly subscription starts at $16.05 and comes with a free set-top box, versus StarHub’s $24.68 plus extra for its set-top box.
‘Until now, there has been only one supplier,’ MrLew said yesterday. ‘Consumers have been forced to accept the incumbent’s offering. Today, we change the game … and offer choice and flexibility.’
mio TV will have 33 channels, including the current seven free-to-air channels. Mr Lew would not reveal the cost of content agreements signed with several parties including BBC Global Channels, Mei Ah TV for Cantonese movies, Sony Pictures Television and Walt Disney Television International.
But margins in the Singapore telecoms business ‘will fall from the high 40s (in percentage terms) to the mid-40s due to the acquisition of content’, he said.
He declined to say when SingTel would break even on pay-TV but disclosed that it would spend $30 million on a network upgrade in the first year of operation.
SingTel aims to lead the pay-TV market within a reasonable time, he said.
The service will be available in 85 per cent of homes here, rising to more than 90 per cent by early 2008.
‘The cost of setting up the service will be more than the earnings,’ Sachin Mittal, an analyst at DBS Vickers Research in Singapore, said in a Bloomberg report. ‘It’ll take four, five years to break even. They are looking at this more in terms of a bundled offering and taking a long-term view.’
StarHub, which began offering cable TV in June 1995, had 490,000 subscribing households as at end-March.
Source : Business Times - 22 Jul 2007
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