Cignal subscribers up 36.5% to 600,000

MANILA, Philippines - The subscriber base of the pay-TV arm of dominant carrier Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. (PLDT) jumped 36.5 percent to hit over 600,000 last year boosting the company’s multi-media initiatives.

PLDT president and chief executive officer Napoleon Nazareno said subscribers of Cignal Digital TV reached 602,000 last year or 161,000 more than the previous year’s 441,000.

Nazareno said about 70 percent of the base were prepaid subscribers with plans ranging between P290 and P430 per month.

He added that 30 percent of the base were postpaid subscribers paying P430 to as much as P1,590 per month.

This, according to him, translated to a blended average revenue per user (ARPU) of P317.

Services being offered by Cignal include over-the-top service called Cignal 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 project is currently in its beta phase and available on mobile devices that run on the Android Jelly Bean operating system and would soon be available on other operating systems.

As of end-December, Nazareno said Cignal TV had 104 channels including 13 free-to air as well as 66 are standard definition channels and 25 high definition channels.

According to him, the direct-to-home Cignal TV is a crucial component of the multimedia initiatives of the PLDT Group.

Through the PLDT triple-play, he said subscribers could enjoy a dedicated connection PLDT Fibr for the fiber-to-the-home, landline through Telpad, and Cignal TV.

He explained that Cignal would provide the TV portion while PLDT as access provider would supply landline 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 distributor like Sony Pictures and Warner Brothers as well as 250 TV series and Anime through MyPinoy TV.

Likewise, Home e-Portal is now available to DSL subscribers allowing access to movies through Clickplay, TV series through MyPinoy TV, music through Spinnr, games via EA Games, livesports such as Philippine Basketball Association/ Olympics/ Superbowl, and exclusive content.