Sky pushes on through the the 5 million broadband customer mark

The league table of UK broadband providers has started its quarterly update,
with Sky first out of the blocks with its financial results. The results to the
end of September 2013 reveal a milestone has been
broken with Sky now having 5,017,000 broadband customers, adding 110,000 in the
last quarter, cementing their position in second place.

Sky is reporting 290,000 old O2 customers are contributing to these figures,
with the extra revenue they have brought offsetting the lose in revenue Sky
suffered by stopping selling ESPN at the end of July. The ARPU (Average Revenue
Per User per year) across the Sky TV/phone/broadband empire is now £559, a £17
rise over the past year, but down £10 compared to the previous quarter.

Sky has its LLU network (ADSL2+) available at some 2,354 exchanges, which
means it is available at some 88% of UK households, adding 31 exchanges in the
last quarter.

The rise of the connected TV continues too, Sky has some 3.351m of its
Sky+HD boxes now connected to the Internet and weekly access levels for On
Demand content has increased four fold over the quarter and the number of movie
rentals has doubled via Sky Store in the last year. The Sky financials do not
show any split between the pushed overnight content from the satellites versus
pure IPTV on-demand content.

The race for third place is going to be interesting, as if Virgin Media does
not show significant growth in cable broadband customers it runs the risk of
being overtaken by TalkTalk who are now heavily pushing their services,
including TV.