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DirecTV enjoys fruitful Q1, demand for HD / DVRs to thank
Nah, Comcast wasn't shedding any tears after announcing its Q1 2008 earnings, but DirecTV must be grinning from ear-to-ear. Aside from seeing its earnings rise 10-percent and revenues climb 17-percent, the satcaster also managed to grab 275,000 net subscriber additions. Analysts were quite pleased with the exceptionally low churn rate, as many of its subscribers seem to be staying put. And with close to a hundred HD channels on tap, who can blame them? It was also noted that average revenue per subscriber crept up from $73.40 to $79.70, and an increasing demand for high-definition programming and DVRs were largely to thank. Is making the switch from cable to satellite worth it? Seems that quite a few folks said yes with their wallets this past quarter.[Via BloggingStocks]
Comcast thrives on broadband, digital phone subscriptions in Q1
Comcast's Q1 earnings report was fairly devoid of surprises, with a net income of $732 million compared with $837 million in the same quarter last year. It should be noted, however, that Q1 2007 included a $300 million one-time gain "from the dissolution of a cable partnership with Time Warner Cable in which Comcast received cable systems in Houston." The only interesting tidbits were the sectors in which the carrier lost and gained subscribers: 57,000 basic cable customers jumped ship, while 492,000 new high-speed internet and 639,000 digital voice customers signed on. It was also noted that 494,000 individuals picked up its digital cable service (compared with last year's 658,000), but it failed to say how many were paying out for HD. If we had to guess, we'd say satellite / fiber are beginning to eat away at the coax-laden mothership.[Via CNN Money]
AT&T has secured 379,000 U-verse TV subscribers
While Verizon was busy acquiring over a quarter-million new FiOS TV customers during Q1 2008, AT&T wasn't resting on its laurels. The company managed to pick up 148,000 new U-verse TV customers in the same period, pushing the 231,000 it ended 2007 with up to a new total of 379,000. Potentially more interesting is the firm's intentions to still hit the long-standing goal of netting a million subscribers before 2009 dawns, and as if that wasn't bold enough, it's looking to pass approximately 30 million living units by the end of 2010 (it's at 9 million now). Of course, we aren't discounting the company's ability to do so -- after all, it is rolling out service to a plethora of new locales at a pretty brisk rate -- but with the inability to record two HD channels at once, we can't see it really catching on until a few more limitations are lifted.
Verizon adds 263,000 new FiOS TV customers in Q1 2008
Verizon's Q1 2008 results just hit the streets, and only three months after the carrier landed its one millionth subscriber, it's now well on its way to netting the second million. During Q1, the company managed to sign up 263,000 new FiOS TV customers and 262,000 net new FiOS internet customers, bringing the grand total to 1.2 / 1.8 million for each respective service. Call it a hunch, but it looks like Verizon's really onto something with this fiber-based TV thing.
DirecTV's net income down slightly, uptick in HD consumption blamed
We already heard plenty of rosy news out of the Comcast camp, and generally speaking, the message is equally positive from DirecTV. Granted, the firm reported "only" $348 million in net income compared to $356 million a year earlier, but revenues managed to skyrocket some 17-percent. The reason, according to CNN Money, is the substantial uptick in demand for "more costly high-definition TV and digital recording features." Also of note, DTV hooked nearly half a million new subscribers in Q4 alone, and the monthly churn rate had dropped to 1.42-percent -- its "lowest in eight years." Consumers flocking to HD? Imagine that![Via Bloomberg]
Comcast nets 2.5 million new digital cable subscribers, lots of cash in 2007
Verizon isn't the only major cable provider walking with a bounce in its step in 2008, as Comcast's latest earnings report revealed that the company snagged 2.5 million new digital cable subscribers and $2.6 billion in net income during 2007. Also of note, it made sure we knew that 42-percent of its digital cable customers took advantage of "advanced services such as DVR and high-definition television" compared to 36-percent a year prior. Unfortunately, it failed to reveal exactly what percentage was subscribed addicted to HD programming, but we were told that pay-per-view revenue shot up 22-percent to a staggering $774 million in the last 12 months.[Via Light Reading, image courtesy of Thermocaster]
GameTap gets interviewed on Myst Online's untimely demise
Recently, Ten Ton Hammer sat down with GameTap's Creative Director and VP of Content to discuss the death of Myst Online: Uru Live. The interview itself covers a lot of ground on the why and how of the game. Subjects like the reason GameTap originally picked up the title are covered, as well as how satisfied the publisher was with Cyan Worlds' first season of content. It's a fairly short interview, but there is some knowledge to be gleaned from it for anybody interested.It's not surprising to us that their biggest disappointment was a lack of subscriber interest. We have to wonder just how many people actually ended up playing the game, considering its alternative nature. Niche titles are loved by many of us here at Massively, so one thing we've been noticing is that some developers are still trying to figure out the exact cost-to-profit ratio when creating them. Hopefully GameTap learned something from this venture and doesn't shy away from other alternative MMOs in the future.
AT&T ends 2007 with 231000 U-verse subscribers
Make no mistake, the number 231,000 in and of itself isn't exactly valuable, but considering that AT&T is aiming to secure one million subscribers to its fiber-based U-verse service before this year comes to a close, it certainly comes into perspective. Just months ago, AT&T was reporting that it had 126,000 U-verse customers and was handling around 10,000 installs per week. Currently, the carrier is suggesting that it's over one-fourth of the way to its goal, but considering that "just" 12,000 installs per week are being done now, it's not exactly on track to hit that million. 'Course, if it keeps on rolling U-verse out to new markets at a furious pace, we suppose anything could happen, but it's not like the provider hasn't overshot estimates in the past.
Verizon grabs one million FiOS TV subscribers
Just months after Verizon celebrated two years of FiOS, and merely four days after celebrating the same for New York, the firm has found yet another reason to boogie down. After a "banner 2007" and a presumably successful January 2008, the outfit has finally netted its one millionth FiOS TV subscriber. The milestone makes it the tenth largest cable provider in the United States, and considering that Mediacom is holding down the nine spot with 1.3 million, we'd say VZW is well on its way into single digits on the leaderboard. Meanwhile, that other fiber-based television carrier is aiming to hit the same mark before 2008 draws to a close.
How much money Blizzard is really making from 10 million subscribers
An article on Playfuls.com (which I found via Incgamers) tried to take the news about Blizzard's ten million subscribers from earlier this week, and suss out just how much money they're making. They do what most people would do, which is multiply their $15 subscription rate per month times ten million, which would mean that Blizzard is raking in $150 million a month, or about $1.7 billion a year is gross profits.Except that's not right. Because while North American and European players pay about $15 a month, many Chinese and Asian subscribers don't pay monthly-- they pay hourly, at a much lower rate than what other players around the world pay. With 2.5 million and 2 million subscribers in North American and Europe respectively, Blizzard is still making $810 million a year (not to mention the cost to purchase the original game and the expansion pack, which at this point is probably negligible at this point given how much retailers like to take out) in those places. But that leaves 5.5 million players in other countries, and their payment plans aren't as rigidly defined.Of course, obviously these are all estimates as well, and they're gross, too-- you have to remember that Blizzard pays a huge group of people money to keep up content, customer service, promotion, and administration, as well as maintenance on what must be a huge number of servers (each realm has at least three or four servers running on it, for each continent and all the instances). And Blizzard has other income coming in as well-- licensing fees, fees from The9 (the company that actually runs WoW in China, and likely collects subscription fees there), transfer fees from players, and so on.Don't get me wrong-- Blizzard is still making a lot of net money on the deal, easily into the hundred millions. But it's not as easily as multiplying what you're paying by ten million, because that's just not the case.
Stonehenge is open for business
Those of you who've been waiting for Stonehenge Chronicles -- the first major content update for Hellgate: London -- to finally be released can stop as of yesterday. The content went live for players yesterday morning after being delayed a day over some technical bugs. Aside from all of the new content featured in and around Stonehenge, all players get to taste some brand new features, game tweaks and the newly redesigned Evoker class. Among the new features are scaling interface elements -- something everyone appreciates, a streamlining of the crafting system and the addition of account-based buddy lists.We're glad to see that Flagship Studios is also addressing bugs as well as improving some player texturing. However what would really help in the future are instability updates for the game engine and maybe an improved chat window. More content is a good start, but while you're busy working on new stuff for those subscribers it would be a good idea to make sure new players have reason to pick the game up as well.
WoW surpasses 10 million subscribers, now half the size of Australia
World of Warcraft continues to live up to the acronym, now supporting a subscriber base of more than 10 million. (Actually, those subscribers do the 'supporting' – due to pay nearly $2 billion to Blizzard and its parent companies over the course of this year.) Just how big is 10 million? If Blizzard drafted all WoW players into a private army, the armed force would easily trump the size of the world's ten largest armies combined. In civilian terms: WoW players now equal half of Australia's total population. Blizzard defines subscribers as those who have paid a subscription fee or are using an active prepaid card, as well as those who have purchased the game and are within their free month of access. Internet Game Room players who have accessed the game during the last 30 days are also counted as subscribers, but players under free promotional subscriptions, expired or canceled subscriptions and expired prepaid cards are excluded. WoW currently totals more than 2 million subscribers in Europe, more than 2.5 million in North America and approximately 5.5 million in Asia. [Via WoW Insider]
World of Warcraft hits 10 million players
Blizzard has announced that the little game that could has hit another big, round number: they are now claiming 10 million World of Warcraft players globally. Gamasutra is reporting that WoW has about 2 million subscribers in Europe, about 2.5 million in North America, and approximately 5.5 million in Asia. They've also taken the step of qualifying what they mean when they say 'subscriber', something critics have used as a knock against their impressive subscriber numbers in the past due to the way that accounts are used in Korea and China. A subscriber, according to Blizzard, is someone who has "paid a subscription fee or have an active prepaid card to play World of Warcraft, as well as those who have purchased the game and are within their free month of access."That number notably doesn't count promo subscriptions, expired accounts, canceled subscriptions, or unused prepaid cards. They are counting 'PC Bang' players by considering an account active if it has been used within the last 30 days. Subscribers that connect to the game under licensees like The9 are counted under the same guidelines.It's a little staggering to consider the sheer number of people playing this game now. When I started playing these games 50,000 people in one world was a big deal; Lineage, EQ, and FFXI were big-time by being at or over 500,000 people. Now with titles like WoW, Gaia Online, MapleStory, and even Habbo Hotel demolishing the old concept of a Massive world, it's ... more than a little bit exciting. I also think it's time that people just stop comparing WoW to other US-developed MMOs. People keep talking about a "WoW Killer", but ... 10 MILLION people, people. World of Warcraft isn't a game, it's a city. It makes as much sense to compare WoW to Dungeons and Dragons Online as it does to compare Scrabble with Chicago. That's just my opinion ... what do you think? Will there be a "WoW Killer" someday?
A tale of grinding, sucking and snowboarding
Cameron Sorden has an interesting post about grinding and why it sucks over on his blog, Random Battle. It's mostly focused on World of Warcraft, because like many of us he plays the game quite a bit. We can all agree that grinding endlessly is no fun, but some of the suggestions made by Cameron seem a bit strange. Such as the idea of having a snowboarding mini-game in WoW to off-set the tedium of grinding. Now we get what he's trying to say here, "Add more stuff other than monster killing, quests/raids and battlegrounds please." And sure, putting in a mini-game where you snowboard down the Alterac Mountains wouldn't be the usual grind-fest, but it also has nothing to do with WoW. Then there's his claim that wow needs to become even more casual, which we're not even sure how it could do that without renaming itself "Club Wowkinz" or something. Cameron feels it will be a necessity for World of Warcraft to add new and interesting ways to alleviate the grind, but from what we've seen there are mostly more raids on the horizon. Yet we would argue that even though people say that grinding isn't what they want, they don't seem to realize it's what they keep buying. It's not as if World of Warcraft is nearing 10 million subscribers, right? Oh wait, yeah, it is.
How the Writer's Strike could cost iTunes subscribers
Macworld (the magazine, not the party that many of us are missing out on this week) has an interesting note up about how the writer's strike is going to be bad news for iTunes subscribers, and it's not what you think. Sure, the whole strike is supposedly about television writers getting paid for their work from online sales (which means that if the writers win, networks will likely claim they have to charge more for sales on iTunes and other digital outlets), but there's another negative: no writers means shorter seasons, which means iTunes subscriptions aren't worth as much. Desperate Housewives and Prison Break had both of their seasons cut short, and that means that anyone who bought either of those seasons isn't getting as much as they expected for their money.As MW says, the closest thing they've heard to an answer from Apple on this is an example of The Daily Show and Colbert Report subscriptions-- subscribers of those shows were told that their subscriptions would resume when the shows did, so people who have subscribed to Desperate Housewives may just expect to have part of the next season paid for already as well (or may get refunds of iTunes credit for other shows that are available).And it'll be interesting to see what effect this has on the keynote at Macworld tomorrow-- will Apple promote television shows that are headed off the air for a while? Or maybe the rumored movie rentals will draw attention away from iTunes TV subscriptions anyway.
OTA antenna sales skyrocket, cable subscribers jump ship
One could certainly argue the actual link between OTA antenna sales going through the roof while some one million cable subscribers decided to ditch their service this year, but nevertheless, that's exactly what has happened. Richard Schneider, President of Antennas Direct, saw his Terrestrial Digital brand of antenna sales "triple" during the same time period in which the cable industry lost two-percent of its market share, and while there's a very real possibility some of those folks opted for fiber or satellite-based alternatives, we've no doubt that some just decided to make do with the crystal clear, uncompressed HD locals; furthermore, new satellite subscribers in areas without HD locals would be awfully tempted to pick up an OTA antenna to complement their service. Of course, teaching the HD illiterate how to install and use one is a whole 'nother matter.
World of Warcraft hits 9.3 million subscribers
Like a burning crusade marching across the planet, World of Warcraft continues to expand with a population of 9.3 million subscribers. In late July, Blizzard announced that WoW reached the 9 million subscriber mark. All this player retention is fantastic for the game, but World of Warcraft is still an anomaly in the commercial MMORPG genre. If Lord of the Rings Online is in the number two spot like Turbine claims, they have yet to announce even hitting one million subscribers (they cover it smoothly by saying they have four million characters). Although, in all fairness, LotRO hasn't expanded into Asia yet -- that's where the real MMO money is. Blizzard's parent company Vivendi continues to reap the financial rewards of WoW's success as their sales continue to rise. With such massive retention rates on an MMO, we can only imagine what happens when Wrath of the Lich King, the next expansion for WoW, releases sometime next year. [Via Massively]
World of Warcraft still growing -- 9.3 million served
Gamasutra reports that Vivendi, the parent company of Blizzard, has seen its Q3 2007 sales go up 19% over the last quarter. Vivendi credits this growth partially to the Chinese release of The Burning Crusade expansion for World of Warcraft, which occurred in Q3. The company revealed that World of Warcraft now has 9.3 million subscribers -- 300,000 more than the the number reported last quarter.That means that WoW has grown by the size of one and a half EVE Onlines or two whole City of Heroeses in just a few months. Or put another way, the population of World of Warcraft is now greater than the population of Sweden. We think it's safe to say that World of Warcraft will be the dominant title in the industry for a while longer.
Mythic founder: WoW "will be in its decline" in a few years
You could probably fill a library with the number of stupid things game developers say about their competitors, but here's one more. In an interview with Shacknews, former Mythic co-founder Matt Firor, charged with putting together a brand-new MMO, says this about World of Warcraft: ... Any MMO starting development today isn't going to have to worry too much about competing with WoW--it'll be in its decline by the time any new game launches.Think so? From what we've heard from Blizzard, they don't. Even if Blizz only goes two more expansions (and Everquest, the most popular MMO until WoW, went for fourteen), WoW is sticking around for five or six years. And yes, there are those folks who are done now, but Azeroth's population hasn't stopped going up yet-- does Firor really think they won't be a competitor in just a few years?That doesn't mean Blizzard is unbeatable, but it does mean that they're competition. As Firor's former employer says (EA Mythic is now working on Warhammer Online, which some say is WoW's biggest threat in the MMO market), you have to play a different game.WoW is The Beatles, who changed music forever. You can't be the Beatles; they already exist. You can't copy them. If you try, you become The Monkees. You've got no chance. We're not The Beatles. We're Led Zeppelin.Staking your new game on WoW's decline is a bad idea, and predicting that decline to be just a few years off is a worse one. WoW won't last forever, but Blizzard's monster MMO isn't done yet.[ via WorldofWar ]
WoW subscriber levels over nine millionnnnn
Pretty amazing news yesterday that WoW has hit over nine million subscribers (that's current, active subscribers-- we're taking it for granted that Blizzard isn't fudging the numbers) worldwide. They put an official announcement up on their front page, and as Patrick on the WoW LJ noticed, Blizzard may be getting rich, but they've still got a good sense of humor. Mouse over the picture on the post and you'll see what's posted above.So what's next? As Elizabeth said yesterday, there's no question that the Burning Crusade expansion kept players playing, and even brought lots of new players back to the game. There's also no question that this holiday season might be a tough one for keeping players hooked on a four-year-old game, as there are tons of new releases for all the platforms (Warhammer might be WoW's biggest challenger, but don't forget that Halo 3, the new Grand Theft Auto, and a ton of other games are going to vy for the same freetime that WoW takes up). But don't worry-- Drysc has a solution, and it's that they're going to start appealing to some of Earth's other populations. Cat subscribers for the win?
