The churn rate in the last quarter rose to 24.9% from 23.1% in the previous quarter. If the churn rate continues at current levels for the rest of the year, it will mean that one in four ITV Digital customers would have given up their subscriptions.
ITV Digital is forecasting that the churn rate will rise to 30% before improving, according to a company spokesman.
Carlton and Granada shares rose initially this morning, after the company announced that it had beaten analyst expectations by signing up 46,000 new customers in the last quarter of 2001, against predictions of 42,000.
However, at 3.30pm Carlton's share price had fallen 4.29% to 197.75p, while Granada fell 1.48% to 116.25p.
Although ITV Digital has promoted the service through a popular advertising campaign created by Mother and featuring comedian Johnny Vegas and ITV Digital mascot Monkey, subscriber growth has almost halved from the 82,000 the platform attracted during the July-September period.
ITV Digital, with 1.263m subscribers, is still lagging a long way behind digital rival BSkyB which last week announced it had added 218,000 subscribers in 2001, amassing a total of 5.7m subscribers to its Sky Digital platform. BSkyB's churn rate has stabilised at 10%.
ITV Digital said it aims to reduce its churn rate to 20% by the end of 2003 and to break even by 2004. This compares with BSkyB, which believes it will move into pre-tax profit by the end of 2003.
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