From the front

Currently listening to the Sky quarterly conference call, where there have been a couple of datapoints for TV bulls. James Murdoch has said that 45% or so of TV sales (>21-inch) in the UK currently are HD-ready sets, and he is expecting that the addressable HD footprint for the 2006 Christmas season will be around 2.7m sets. The company has 40k pre-orders for its HD offering, which is more than Sky+ did in the first year on the market. He also said that Sky By Broadband (the Kontiki-powered download service) has 250k registered users and has served 1m downloads since launch a couple of months back. Sky is currently unbundling 12 exchanges a week and expects to have 30% population coverage in the UK by the end of June.