Fibrus is adding a TV service to its broadband line
Fibrus is putting television down its broadband line. The altnet, which has built full fibre across Northern Ireland and rural parts of northern England including Cumbria, announced Fibrus TV this morning, and as reported by ISPreview the add-on goes live next week from £7.99 a month, against what the announcement calls a normal subscription price of £9.99.
What is in it, on the company’s own description of the package: more than 100 live channels through Freely, including BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5, then around 150 more streamed channels, apps from the Google Play Store, and a library of over 300 cloud games. It runs on Netgem’s PLEIO box. No dish, no aerial. Nothing on your existing line changes and nobody has to take it.
Why pay monthly for free TV?
Fair question. Freely is a free to air service, so the main channels in that list are not really what the money is for. The fee covers the box, the extra streamed channels, the games and the platform holding it all together. One figure to weigh against it, from the same report: the PLEIO box sells on its own through Amazon for £99, and that price includes the box, a remote, a gamepad and a 12-month premium content subscription. At £7.99 a month you reach roughly the same outlay inside a year. Whether the monthly route or the kit outright suits you better is a question about how long you want to be tied in.
The thin part today is the small print, and we would rather say so than guess at it. ISPreview tried the fibrus.com/tv page and found it was not live yet. So the details that actually decide whether £7.99 is good value are still unpublished: how long that price runs for, what it goes to afterwards, and whether the TV add-on is tied to your broadband contract at all. Our guide to broadband price rises sets out how mid-contract increases normally work, and those are the questions to put to Fibrus before adding anything to a bill.
The results published alongside the launch are worth a glance if Fibrus serves your street or might one day. ISPreview reports the network now passes about 471,800 premises with 155,000 customers, so a little over 31 per cent of the homes it reaches have signed up. Revenue is up 53 per cent to £45m, EBITDA is positive at £7.3m, and the net loss for the year was £44m, down from £57.6m. Growing, and still spending more than it earns. That is the ordinary shape of a network part way through its build, and our guide on whether altnets are safe covers what it means for someone who is already a customer. The Fibrus page has what we hold on its coverage, and our availability checker will say which networks reach your address today.