Telstra TV in 75,000 homes, telco insists Foxtel subs base safe despite soft first half growth

Australia’s biggest telco, Telstra says it is happy with the initial growth of its new, low-cost streaming product, Telstra TV, with yesterday’s half-year ASX reporting the number of boxes sold at 43,000.

However, the telco later clarified that this figure is only to December 31 and that it now believes it has sold 75,000 of the Telstra TV boxes, which aggregate streaming access to SVOD and catch-up TV.

Last year, Telstra stopped selling its popular TBox product which was a major drive of subscriptions to pay-TV service Foxtel, and in October launched the Telstra TV device instead, which uses the Roku2, a device similar to rival Apple TV.

At the time of its announcement media buyers expressed concern about the risk to Foxtel’s subscriber base but Andy Penn, CEO of Telstra, yesterday sought to reassure the market that this wasn’t the case.