According to Australian IT today, Austar CEO John Porter has stated that launching HD channels on Austar probably won’t happen any time soon, as they are struggling to find a financial model that will actually make them money from new subscribers.
Although – just to confuse us all – he then stated that they will probably still release a HD-capable PVR in the 3rd quarter of 2009, although they may not accompany the hardware with any HD programming.
He also played down the announcement made back in May that the new HD PVR would be “content agnostic” with the ability to play video from the web:
“Slowly we’ll introduce HD and web-based services and those kind of
things. But technology for technology’s sake just because
it’s available – we can’t afford to do that sort of thing.”
It’s a sad day for Austar subscribers everywhere.