UPC announces Sky+ rival

14-08-2007

by Stephen Errity

NTL and Chorus parent company UPC announced Tuesday the launch of a new Digital Video Recorder (DVR) product for the Irish market.

Digital Video Recorders allow customers to record TV programs, as well as pause and rewind live TV. The recorder captures the original digital broadcast signal, which means playback can be offered at the same quality as live viewing. The product also offers parental viewing controls.

"The UPC DVR is priced to allow everyone to enjoy the benefits of the Digital Video Recorder. Until now the Irish consumer had to pay over EUR190 upfront for a DVR product," said Simon Kelehan, video product and TV manager of UPC Ireland in a statement "UPC is about offering a new kind of choice to Irish consumers and with this announcement we are continuing to deliver on this promise," he added.

UPC's offering has a hard drive capacity of 160GB, allowing up to 80 hours of television to be recorded. This is twice the capacity of the Sky+ set-top box. The company says it will not be charging an upfront equipment fee for new customers until the end of September. Existing customers can avail of the product for a one-off installation fee of EUR49, plus an additional EUR7.50 per month on top of their existing digital TV subscription fees.

The DVR product is currently available to all cable and MMDS homes across Dublin, Waterford and Galway and UPC says it will launch in the rest of the country in October.

The market for digital TV and DVR products in Ireland is a large and rapidly growing one. Figures released in May showed that a third of all Irish households now subscribe to BSkyB's Sky Digital product, UPC's chief rival in the Irish market. The British broadcaster added 19,000 Irish subscribers to its books in the three months to 31 March 2007, bringing the total to 484,000. The company's Sky+ DVR service also performed well in the same period, increasing its customer base by 199,000 in Britain and Ireland to total of 2.167 million accounts. UPC Ireland, meanwhile, said it boosted its digital TV customer base by 18 percent in the second quarter of this year.