The Walloon pay-TV operator Be TV has just turned its first ever profit. In the first six months of 2007 the company made a net profit of €2.145 million, and an EBITDA of €4.125 million, BeTV’s CEO Daniel Weekers told the French language Belgian press in an interview. He did not divulge any revenue figures, but the number of subscribers grew to 123,000 from 116,000 over the period, taking out a total of 285,000 subscriptions (mixture of premium channels and thematic packages), up from 268,000.
The profit follows a restructuring that took place over the last year, reducing the number of employees to 200.
Weekers also expects BeTV to profit considerably from a combined offer, from September onwards, when VOO has finalised the consolidation of the Walloon cable operators and considerably increases the number of digital homes it serves.
The operator is in addition on track in its discussions with Coditel to launch HD channels, in two to three months time, on the latter’s HD platform, which made its debut in June. Weekers said that BeTV has already managed to clear all the rights for BeTV HD and was waiting for the cable operators to choose their decoder platform, expecting that it will take 6-9 more months before the HD PVRs will be commercialized.
BeTV was formed in October 2004, when Walloon cable operators (now VOO) and investment funds Deficom and Socofe acquired local Canal+ assets from Vivendi Universal.