Australian pay-TV operator Foxtel  is at the forefront at bringing advanced TV services to the regional market. In early November, Foxtel added 10 new HD channels, giving it a total of 15 HD channels to subscribers.

    In an interview with NAB E-daily, Foxtel’s executive director of content Patrick Delany talks about the fiercely competitive Australian HD and the company’s development plans this year.

NAB E-daily: What kind of HD offering does your company hope to have in 12 months time?

Delany: I would like to double our HD subscriber base in the next 12 months. Our observation of HD in Australia is that it is a bit like the DVR experience. It really captures peoples’ imaginations, which you see when people interact with it. With DVDs word of mouth was very strong in promoting DVDs in Australia. Once the early adopters gave the product strong word of mouth, it really took off. I think we will see something similar in terms of HD. I am hoping with these extra 10 HD channels, will drive extremely good word of mouth for HD.

NAB E-daily: What are the challenges in fulfilling your 2010 HD strategy?

Delany: One of the restrictions we had was limited bandwidth. However, with the launch of a new satellite here (Optus D3) and our continuing access to HFC cables we are able to explode out the amount of HD choice and flexibility we offer customers.  When you combine this expanded HD channel choice with a disk drive with massively expanded storage capacity, and a revamped electronic programming guide you can really take your HD offering to the next level. The strategy then is about offering customers HD value, choice, flexibility and control over what they watch and when.

NAB E-daily: Are you looking to acquire more satellite capacity? If so, is it available?

Delany: With the initial channels that we launched, we had maxed out capacity on our satellite. We have recently seen the new D3 satellite being launched, which means satellite capacity is much less of a constraint now we will be using significant capacity on that satellite to launch HD channels. We plan to launch many more HD and SD channels. We are going to have a very big revamp of all of our technology and platform to make the most of a combination of DVR technology with things such as advanced interfaces, as well as new HD and SD channels. We will use the satellite and cable to bring the next generation of broadcast technology to consumers.

NAB E-daily: Have the numbers taking the iQ2 HD box been in line with your own expectations?

Delany: The number of people taking the Foxtel HD iQ2 box has been around what we hoped. We are close to 10 percent penetration, which is around 125,000 customers.  I think we made the right decisions when we started out in terms of infrastructure costs. We started out with two sports HD channels, as well as two great channel brands, National Geographic and Discovery. We also had the BBC HD channel. We had a strong line-up of channels. The other thing we did which was very successful was offer PPV HD movies. We integrated this with the EPG so we had a really strong interface, then when you look at titles, you could see trailers and so on which worked fantastically to promote and the movies. We felt we had a good start-up strategy, from which to build on strongly. We are very satisfied with 10 percent penetration of HD.