Portugal - MEO surpasses 300 thousand customers

Thursday, December 18th, 2008
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Portugal Telecom (Lisbon: PTC; NYSE: PT) announced today that Meo, its pay-TV service, surpassed 300 thousand customers, representing circa 43% of PT’s ADSL customers and 11% of its traffic generating lines. Net additions in the quarter to date surpassed 89 thousand customers.

Meo, the integrated offer of voice, internet and pay-TV services, represents a key lever of PT’s strategy to strengthen and differentiate its value proposition to residential customers. Meo is based on a multiplatform concept that is intended to provide the same TV experience, regardless of the customer platform or interface. Meo provides access to a comprehensive content offering, with more than 110 TV channels and over 1,500 real video-on-demand titles.

Portugal Telecom has, since launch, continuously strengthened the Meo offer with new features and content. On 28 November 2008, Meo launched JimJam, a new children’s channel fully dubbed into Portuguese and with a special programming line-up for the Christmas season. On 6 December 2008, Meo, in partnership with NBC Universal Global Networks, launched Sci-Fi, the first exclusive scientific fiction channel in Portugal. Furthermore, and as part of Meo’s ongoing innovation strategy in pay-TV, PT has, since November 2008, included content from Sapo, its internet portal, on the Meo platform – news, and geo-referenced useful information such as traffic, weather and pharmacies, available onscreen to all Meo customers.

PT also launched recently Meo’s Christmas campaign with a strong focus on the video-on-demand offer, which remains a distinctive factor of Meo’s TV-experience, thus contributing to maintain high brand notoriety levels. In effect, proved ad recall remains at around 50%. The video-on-demand offer continues to have a marked success, as over 40% of the Meo customer base already used this feature and on average monthly users have 3.8 rentals per month.

In the quarter, PT also launched a new set-top-box for the satellite platform, which provides access to advanced features such as digital recording and pause live-TV, delivering a satellite TV-experience in line with the Meo IPTV experience.