NTL Ireland
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NTL Communications (Ireland) Limited is a cable television and MMDS company in the Republic of Ireland. As of 2005 it is owned by Liberty Global Europe (see history, below), having been divested by NTL. It continues to use the NTL brand under licence pending a rebranding, most likely as UPC Ireland.
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[edit] Services
The company holds cable television licences for Dublin, Galway, and Waterford cities (with the Dublin licence also covering Leixlip, County Kildare, Dunboyne, County Meath, and Bray, County Wicklow). It also holds MMDS franchises for cells covering the above counties, as well as County Mayo. It provides an analogue cable television service (with a very high take up in its areas passed), which provides the Irish terrestrial channels, plus BBC One, BBC Two, UTV , Channel 4, Sky One, Sky News Ireland, and a small number of other channels. It also provides a digital television service, with over a third of its customer base taking a digital service. The company has also converted its entire MMDS network to digital, with an offering of approximately 70 TV and radio services. The analogue MMDS is now switched off.
Over the past 2 years the company has been aggressively rolling out broadband and have enabled one third of its Dublin and 100% of its network in Galway and Waterford for Broadband. The company is rapidly becoming a major Broadband provider in Ireland.
[edit] History
[edit] RTÉ / Telecom ownership
The company began operations in 1970 as RTÉ Relays, a subsidiary of Radio Telefís Éireann. It carried four channels - RTÉ Television, BBC1 , BBC2, and Ulster Television. In 1984, the company merged with Dublin Cable Systems, itself the product of a merger of Marlin Cable with Phoenix Relays. In 1986, the Irish Government began to allow Irish cable companies to carry non-terrestrial (ie satellite) services. In the same year, RTÉ merged all of its cable operations (including two other cable companies, Galway Cablevision and Waterford Cablevision) to form Cablelink Limited.
As Cablelink, the company was Ireland's largest cable company by far, and expanded to a fifteen channel service (plus premium channels) gradually. In 1990, Telecom Éireann acquired 60% of the company from RTÉ. The biggest controversy the company managed to embroil itself during this time was a dispute with British Sky Broadcasting over carriage fees for Sky One and Sky News. This led to the two channels being pulled from the platform from 1992-1994. The "return of Bart Simpson" was prematurely announced by Cablelink several times before the channels actually reappeared.
[edit] Sale to NTL
In 1999, as part of the privatisation of Eircom, the Government put pressure on the shareholders of Cablelink to sell the company. Part of the reason was that Eircom was regarded by some as a "spoiler shareholder" in Cablelink, refusing to allow the company to compete in the voice telephony market that it dominated. The company was put up for auction, with bidders including Esat Telecom Group, NTL, and UPC, as well as CMI Cable and Irish Multichannel. It was eventually announced that NTL would acquire the company for IR£650m (€825 million).
Under NTL, the company was renamed NTL Ireland on 3 July 2000, and began offering telephony and internet services. The company began to upgrade its network and in 2001 launched its digital television service. However the company lost two managing directors during the time NTL ran the franchise. The biggest crisis erupted in early 2001, when NTL stopped selling its direct telephony and high-speed internet services, and halted the roll out of its upgraded hybrid fibre coax network. This led to a very public row with the Commission for Communications Regulation, and the resignation of Ian Jeffers, the NTL executive who had been assigned to the Dublin operation upon the NTL takeover. Some years later, the company was forced to suspend its telephone service after problems with the equipment emerged.
[edit] Sale to Morgan Stanley
Despite NTL Ireland turning a profit as a result of its expected merger with Telewest, the Irish assets were now considered non-core. In May 2005, NTL sold its Irish business to Morgan Stanley (on behalf of Liberty Global Europe (then called UGC Europe)). MS Irish Cable Holdings, a subsidiary of Morgan Stanley, held the stake on UGC's behalf, until the deal received regulatory clearance.
However a Competition Authority investigation into the proposed re-sale of the company to Liberty Global Europe took place. On 4 November 2005 it was announced the Competition Authority had cleared the deal, subject to the appointment of an independent director to the board of UPC Ireland and restrictions on the influence of John C. Malone on the running of the Irish business.
The deal was approved by the Minister for Enterprise, Trade & Employment, Micheál Martin on 5 December 2005, and closed on 12 December 2005. For now, Liberty continues to use the NTL brand (under licence) in Ireland. However, it is expected that Liberty Global will shortly merge NTL Ireland with its existing Irish operations - Chorus Communications - as UPC Ireland.
In early 2006 the two companies were placed under a single management team. On 3 July 2006 it was reported on RTÉ News that as part of the merger, up to 350 jobs would be lost, including the closure of NTL's call centre in Waterford. The two brands remain for the time being however.
[edit] Rebranding
What is presumed to be the start of a rebranding process of NTL Ireland began in September 2006. On 5 September, digiboxes were updated to remove "Intermission" from the guide, and replace it with "Channel Off Air", and the ntl.ie website, which had long been dormant, was updated to a new layout extremely similar to that of chorus.ie. It is unknown if the two updates are connected, but it is presumable that at the very least, the website update is part of the rebranding process.
It is unknown if, assuming a full rebranding is carried out, if UPC will merge the layouts of digital channels of the two. It is likely that if the channel numbers are merged, that a system similar to NTL Ireland's current one, as NTL currently has over well over 100 channels available, but Chorus only uses a 2-digit numbering system. It may also cause some channels to be dropped or added - numerous channels are available only on NTL (e.g. some of the MTV UK and Ireland channels) and some only on Chorus (e.g. ITV3 or Eurosport) which may either cause UPC to add all channels to both, drop the ones they don't have in common, or a mix of both.
