Berkett's words on HD

A full transcript of Neil Berkett's presentation is now available online (courtesy of www.seekingalpha.com). It's mainly financial in the presentation's content and with the Q&A, but there were a few tidbits relevant to HD and the V+:

We also had another good quarter of V+ growth. We've doubled the number of subscribers in the last year. Our research shows that DVR customers churn less than other customers. Even with a strong growth we still only penetrated 15% of that digital base so we feel there is still a strong growth opportunity here.

All of our half million DVR boxes are HD ready and we intend to grow our HD content and capability this year. Clearly, our competitors have indicated that this is an area where they intend to invest and grow and we are determined that we are not going to allow them to build competitive advantage in this area. Of course, our competitive TV advantages in VOD and we already have over 100 out of HD video-on-demand content and we will be expanding this.

The key HD content that we do today are premium sports and movie channels that Sky will not [inaudible]. As you know, OFCOM is conducting a market investigation into pay TV and that's our last consultation paper proposed a wholesale regime that would oblige Sky to wholesale its premium content including HD to us at economic rates. We are proactively engaged with OFCOM and we hope to hear the next steps in May or June.

[...] I've expressed my frustrations on several occasions, publicly and privately at the complexity and opaquely of the regulatory environment of which OFCOM and the Competition Commission needs to work within. We are hopeful that Digital Britain itself will start to address some of the deficiencies in the process such that when a regulator can come out and say there is some fundamental things that are wrong in this market that it could still take months and, yes, it could take years. So – unfortunately, we will continue to work with the regulators and with government to ensure that the whole of the market get access to content that is withheld by a dominant player and hopefully, UK consumers can reap the benefit of it.