Hawaiian Telcom may still be a nascent player in the TV space, but like its larger incumbent telco brothers AT&T (NYSE: T) and CenturyLink (NYSE: CTL), it is finding that its TV service is producing two benefits: reducing churn and driving up broadband attachment rates.
As of the end of March, about 93 percent of all video subscribers had subscribed to double- or triple-play bundles, a factor that drove up average revenue per user (ARPU) 5.8 percent year-over-year.
"Approximately 69 percent of the gross video subscribers we added this quarter are new [to] Hawaiian Telcom, and across all of our video subscribers, we continue to see a very high rate of broadband attachment," said Scott Barber, COO, during the earnings call, according to a Seeking Alpha transcript. "When we look at our existing video subscriber base, approximately 93 percent are bundling with broadband."
Barber added that as it continues "to expand the reach of our enabled footprint, Hawaiian Telcom TV will continue to be the catalyst for market share gain in broadband."
The telco added 1,600 TV subscribers in the first quarter, ending the quarter with about 29,700 subscribers, with a large portion being new subscribers.
In tandem with TV growth, Hawaiian Telcom is seeing more of its residential customers sign up for higher speed bandwidth services between 21 to 500 Mbps speeds, particularly in areas of its footprint where it has built out its last mile fiber network.
"On O'ahu, where the majority of our consumer HSI subscribers are located and where a focus of our next-generation fiber network investment has been, we continue to see more and more customers migrate to higher bandwidth offerings, which is driving meaningful year-over-year growth in HSI ARPU," Barber said. "At the end of the first quarter, 45 percent of our consumer HSI subscribers on O'ahu [were] on 21 megabits to 500 megabits speeds, up from 32 percent in the same period a year ago."
For more:
- see the earnings transcript
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