will sky be affected by recession

scanner

:mad: with the recession getting worse by the minute and thousands of people losing their jobs and even the ones lucky enough to keep theirs being forced into radical paycuts sky must belosing thousands of subscriptions, do you think they will be forced to reduce their ridiculous subs or will they give the two fingers to their clients and ride it out ?

steveon

It's a very hard one to call in my opinion, but I reckon Sky like every1 else will try till the bitter end to hold their prices, unless as you said they see their subcriber number slide...they dont seem at all bothered with the availability of FREESAT....so deep down I wreckon a price slide unlikely after all they have been screwing the Irish sub's for way 2 long as all us Irish do is complain and do nothing about it in the end...I'd love to be proved wrong

TheDriver

Also, ever notice how a lot of people have sky, including those in social housing where complaints are made every year about costs of fuel etc yet plenty can afford pay tv. How many people are on silly sports packages or have sky yet only watch rte and bbc.
Plenty of poeple could dump sky and not notice the difference, friend of mine had it cancelled after years and coupled the sky box without sub with an aerial and now wonders why he ever paid inthe past

JohnDigital

I don't think this will be an issue as much as you do. With money being tighter it generally means that people will be spending time at home rather than out socialising, thus entertainment at home will become a larger consumer of their time and this inevitably will lead to an increase in TV viewing.

Wizard007

Ok get this, on tuesday march 31st, the amount of orders Sky recieved from Ireland exceeded any other day since it's arrival here. No sign of the recession having an effect on it at all ( thank God )

Pal

that might be because the dodgy boxes went down

Wizard007

The black out of dodgy boxes or not fact is people still had money to pay for Sky and also, I notice alot of orders going through lately are for higher end packages and Sky World. Six months ago it was mostly basic packages for RTE etc. As John says above, people are mostly staying in and TV is becomming a bigger factor in entertainment.

snaps

yep sky uptakes is still as mad as ever. Thats why a pay DTT service will never take off because so many people are getting sky now for their digital fix.

bk

Wizard007 wrote: »

The black out of dodgy boxes or not fact is people still had money to pay for Sky and also, I notice alot of orders going through lately are for higher end packages and Sky World. Six months ago it was mostly basic packages for RTE etc. As John says above, people are mostly staying in and TV is becomming a bigger factor in entertainment.

That strongly indicates to me that it is people coming from UPC dodgy boxes.

Those people would have previously had all the channels, so it would make sense that at least some of them would sign up for Sky World.

However that doesn't indicate Sky is doing well, churn rates is the msot important figure, not new sign ups. You might be signing up more people then ever, but also losing more subs then ever.

Also I'd figure Sky has had to give lots of freebies, (reduced multi-room, few months free,etc) to hold onto customers, so I expect profit margins will be down.

But on the whole I expect Sky can weather recession better then most.

slegs

Was at a talk recently on spending habits is a recession topic and that was one of the main points. In a recession people cut back on the perceived big items like cars, house upgrades, holidays, short breaks etc. But home and cinema entertainment spend rises as it is seen as a good value way of occupying and treating yourself. Music sales is the oldest record of this with music sales inversely trending to recession figures. Similarly with cinema trends going back to the 30s.

bugfreebob

scanner wrote: »

:mad: with the recession getting worse by the minute and thousands of people losing their jobs and even the ones lucky enough to keep theirs being forced into radical paycuts sky must belosing thousands of subscriptions, do you think they will be forced to reduce their ridiculous subs or will they give the two fingers to their clients and ride it out ?

I don't think the recession will have a major impact. People who have less money always seem to favour solutions that involve steady monthly fees rather than solutions that involve lower monthly fees and higher upfront payments. Free-to-air works out as a much better and cheaper solution than Sky for most people...in the medium term...but it does require the initial investment in installation and STBs. During the recession, people may choose Sky in preference, even though it costs them more, because of the lower upfront cost. I am a big fan of Free-to-air, and clearly the benefits of Free-to-air are well understood by Boards users. However, tech-savvy Boards users are not representative of the mass-market who probably prefer Sky as a brand-name they recognise.

Unlike the UK (where Sky have lost half their customers to Freesat/Freeview), there is no serious competition to Sky in Ireland. NTL/UPC are a complete joke, with lousy customer service, no HD, poor channel selection and even higher monthly fees. The only advantage that UPC had was free analogue multi-room and free illegal premium channels via dodgyboxes. Since these features are being turned off, UPC customers will be forced to get new digital STBs for each room with higher subscription for extra premium channels... Better to get Sky.