MONTREAL – Videotron reported Tuesday that it posted “impressive” growth for the third consecutive quarter, exceeding its subscription forecasts for each of its four products – cable television, cable telephone, Internet access and wireless telephone service.
The Quebecor Media subsidiary said that as of Sept. 30, it had a total cable TV customer base of 1.6 million. In the third quarter of 2007, it posted a net increase of 41,000 subscribers to its illico Digital TV service, bringing the total to 720 000.
Videotron’s video-on-demand service, illico on Demand, logged more than 15.6 million paid and free orders in the year-to-date, including 5.5 million orders in the third quarter of 2007.
As of Sept. 30, 574,000 households and organizations were subscribed to Videotron’s cable telephone service. Between July 1 and Sept.30, 70,100 Quebecers signed up, compared with 60,900 subscriptions in the same period of 2006.
Videotron said it set a new weekly record during August with 8,700 new cable telephone customers in one week, including 1,900 subscriptions in a single day. The service also set a new record for quarterly growth.
“I am proud to be able to say that since the deregulation of the local telephone market in the spring, Videotron has continued to compete successfully and our cable telephone product has maintained and indeed increased its popularity with Québec consumers,” said Robert Dépatie, Videotron’s President and Chief Executive Officer.
Since the beginning of 2007, an average of 35% of weekly sales of Videotron’s cable telephone service have been to customers who did not previously subscribe to any Videotron product, the company said. About 67.5% of them took the “trio” package of cable telephone, cable television and Internet service.
Videotron also increased its subscriber base for its Internet access products, adding 45,100 new customers during the third quarter, bringing the total customer base to 899,000 as of Sept. 30.
As of the end of the third quarter, Videotron had activated 39,000 phones on its wireless telephone service, a quarterly increase of 8,000 phones.
www.videotron.com
