UPDATED: Swiss telco Swisscom had reached 694,000 subscribers for its IPTV service ‘Swisscom TV’ by the end of the first half of this year, up 35.5% from one year earlier, including 86,000 new customers in the first half of this year alone.
Demand remains strong for bundled offerings such as triple-play package ‘Vivo Casa’, and by mid-2012, a total of 699,000 customers were using bundled products, 36.5% more than in the previous year.
Swisscom aims to connect roughly a third of Swiss homes and business with fibre-optic cables by the end of 2015. In order to connect other areas more rapidly with high-speed internet cables, the company is additionally focusing on fibre-optic expansion to a point close to the building.
Total revenues across all operations and markets for the first half of this year reached CHF 5.621bn (US$ 5.8bn), down 1.8% on an annual basis, while EBITDA fell 1.5% by the same comparison to reach CHF 2.236bn.
Swisscom launched its IPTV service in 2006 under the name ‘Bluewin TV’, and had become the largest provider of digital TV services in Switzerland by June 2011, overhauling cable operator Cablecom.
Informa Telecoms & Media (publisher of IP&TV News) believes that Swisscom’s growth represents a significant shift in the country’s pay-TV power base, and one which will only continue as it leverages the CHF 30mn contract it won from the Swiss Football Association for coverage of Super League games.
Last month Swisscom deployed a a content recommendation engine from Israeli company Jinni for Swisscom TV which intriguingly promises “taste-and-mood” based recommendations.
