Zon says its basic subscriber base is holding up, despite current economic concerns, and a fall in revenues of 2.5% year on year.
The leading Portuguese cablenet posted a net increase of 12,800 subscribers in the fourth quarter to reach a total of 1,567,100.
A significant number of new customers are taking the high-end IRIS package, which is supported by the NDS Snowflake user interface, and which had 100,000 customers at the year-end.
IRIS was rolled out to laptops, tablets and smartphones during the quarter and now includes remote access to TV content and EPG functionality on the move. An additional 37 thousand next generation ZON Boxes were installed and activated, bringing the total number of ZON Boxes installed to close to 1 million and, of these, 10% were IRIS enabled.
However, premium channel revenues remained stable in the 4th quarter with suggestions that customers are choosing to cut back on premium services.
ARPU in Q4 2011 increased by 1.2% year-on-year to €35.5. Despite the decline in revenues to €215.6 million, EBITDA grew slightly to €73.6 million.
