Cignal subscribers surpass 500,000-mark in end-June

MANILA, Philippines - The subscriber base of the pay-TV arm of dominant carrier Philippine Long Distance Tele- phone Co. (PLDT) has crossed the half-million mark, boosting the com- pany’s multimedia initiatives.

PLDT president and chief executive officer Napoleon Nazareno said sub- scribers of Cignal Digital TV reached 515,000 as of end- June from 457,000 in end-March and 441,000 in end-2012.

Nazareno said Cignal had only 279,000 subscrib- ers as of end-March last year.

He pointed out that the company recently launched an over-the-top service called Cig- nal TV-to-go that allows viewers to watch real-time broadcast feeds of Cignal channels on their smartphones or tablets using the Internet.

He said the proj- ect is currently in its beta phase and available on mobile devices that run on the Android Jelly Bean operating sys- tem and would soon be available on other operating systems.

As of end-July, Nazareno said Cig- nal TV had 88 chan- nels of which 65 are standard defini- tion and 23 are high definition.

Nazareno said subscribers could enjoy a dedicated connection through its triple play in- volving PLDT Fibr for the fiber-to- the-home, landline through Telpad, and Cignal.

He explained that Cignal would provide the TV por- tion while PLDT as access provider would supply land- line and high-speed broadband of up to 100 megabytes per second (Mbps).

He added that PLDT has also tied up with Clickplay, allowing customers to watch videos-on- demand from over 200 blockbuster movies from dis- tributors like Sony Pictures and War- ner Brothers.

Earlier, Cignal managing director and chief operating officer Annie Naval said the company’s subscriber base could hit as many as one million next year from the projected 600,000 this year.

“We are very op- timistic about the business,” Naval stressed.

She explained that the growth would come from the untapped seg- ment as the Philip- pines has the sec- ond lowest pay TV penetration rate of 14 percent, a little higher than Indo- nesia’s nine percent.

Bulk or about 80 percent of the to- tal subscribers are pre-paid customers while 20 percent are post paid customers.

About 24 per- cent of the existing subscriber base of 500,000 is in Metro Manila while the rest are in the prov- inces.