Last month, Foxtel announced that they were launching 30 new channels on the back of the Optus D3 satellite. What they didn’t mention was price. Now they have, and if you were crossing your fingers that they were going to just give you those bonus channels for free, you’re going to be a bit disappointed. Although it’s not all bad…
At a bare minimum, you’re looking at an increase of $2, because the starter package has gone up to $42 (from $40). Platinum subscriptions have added $4 from $106 to $110, while Platinum HD have gone from $131 to $135. The HD add-ons ($10 for HD Sport, $10 for HD Explore and $15 for both) have been consolidated into one package called HD, which is $16.
Aside from that though, all that’s really happened is all the packages have been renamed.
The HD package though, is slightly different for your $16, you get the HD channels that correlate with the other packages you subscribe to. So if you’re on basic, you’ll just get Discovery HD, Fox8 HD and National Geographic HD. If you also subscribe to the Sports channels, you’ll get the HD sports channels as well. Although it would reach a point fairly quickly when you’d just be better off with the Platinum HD package, I’m sure.
Finally, Foxtel have added some new iQ and iQ2 packages. Starting at $72 with an iQ (not iQ2) and ranging up to the $135 HD Platinum pack with an iQ2, each package offers a selection of channel packages and a DVR.
You can check out all the new package details here.