[Satellite News 08-18-08] Foxtel has seen a strong early take-up of high-definition (HD) services in Australia, attracting nearly 40,000 HD subscribers since launching the service in June.
    Patrick Delany, executive director of sales and product development for Foxtel, said these early results have been encouraging and with the costs for HD-ready TV sets plummeting, Foxtel chose the right time to launch HD services in Australia.
“We have been watching the price of large HD-ready panels plummet,” Delany said. … The “prices make them an every-man consumer device. Secondly, the amount of HD content has really exploded. There are major producers of HD content now like BBC, National Geographic and Discovery.”
    Foxtel has around 1.5 million subscribers in Australia, and the company believes 25 percent of those customers have HD-ready TV sets. “The HD disk format war ending with Blu-Ray, as well as our terrestrial competitors talking about HD, meant that Australia was primed for HD,” said Delany. “We think the potential for HD is huge. You don’t need to have an HD set right now to be a potential candidate,” he said.
Improvements in compression rates also have aided the pay-TV operator. “MPEG-4 is pretty stable and has become an accepted standard,” he said. “As a result, the cost of pushing HD signals around has lowered. All of those things combined means we have the opportunity within consumer devices, within Foxtel, to push HD signals around very efficiently.”
    Foxtel believes it has learned from what other satellite pay-TV operators have done in terms of HD. “Most of the operators that have already launched HD services did not have the benefit of MPEG-4 compression and didn’t launch with a combination of disk drive and HD,” said Delany. “We have been a beneficiary of their experience and we are using these newer technologies. Although we are a couple of years after them in terms of launching HD, we are probably right up there in terms of defining compression and disk drives.”
    While the compression advances have helped Foxtel, the company still faces capacity constraints, a problem likely to be remedied when a new satellite reaches orbit in May. Foxtel plans to double the number of HD channels it offers to 10 within 12 months.
    “The amount of capital we have put into making HD real in Australia is upwards of (Australian) $20 million ($18.6 million USD),” said Delany. “In Australia, broadband take-up has been quite slow compared to the rest of the world and expensive. However, the Internet is coming to video, so we saw HD as an important strategic move and advantage over the Internet. We wanted to make sure we could provide beautiful pictures on a bigger screen. We wanted to be a technology as well as a product leader in this area and differentiate ourselves.”
    With TV prices expected to continue their decline, Foxtel sees more growth in its HD services.
    “We will be adding more HD content. HDTV growth will be similar to the past growth pattern of DVRs,” said Delany. “The best advertisement for these services comes from word of mouth of your own customers. We have 350,000 DVR customers and growing and they are helping to drive sales by telling others how great it is. The best way to exhibit HD is to show some SD channels and then take them to a HD version of the channel. People go ‘Wow.’ It just hooks you.”