UPC customers in line for upgrade

ONE MORE THING:STAND BY YOUR remote controls. Competition in the the Irish pay TV market is set to heat up in the next 12 months. At an industry convention in Brussels this week, Liberty Global chief executive Mike Fries confirmed that its Horizon "next- generation" set-top box would be launched in Ireland this year, as it will in the Netherlands, Switzerland and Germany.

This is good news for subscribers of cable company UPC Ireland, a subsidiary of Liberty.

Horizon will offer superior functionality to the current platform and allow viewers to synchronise with mobile devices at home.This will allow consumers to play music or view photos from their mobile devices on their TVs without the need for pesky cables.

The set top box will also incorporate its broadband and voice services. Horizon will also offer thousands of hours of movies and video on demand and dozens of channels. Bliss for couch potatoes.

It should put it up to Sky, its main rival here, especially as Fries said the cost for consumer would only be a few extral euro.

Fries said Liberty has no plans to offer everyone 100 Mbps internet access, preferring instead to “take a breath” at 50 Mbps. This is a small crumb of comfort for cash-starved incumbents such as Eircom, which are struggling to keep pace with UPC on broadband speeds.

Fries said Liberty would also look to muscle in on the mobile phone market, something that UPC’s Irish chief executive Dana Strong flagged to me in an interview last year. Fries said it would take a “capital-light, conservative approach” to mobile.