KIWI TELCO 2DEGREES UPS BROADBAND BATTLE WITH AMAZON DEAL, PRICE FREEZE

Kiwi telco 2degrees is ramping up its push for the broadband market, announcing a new deal with Amazon Prime Video – it’s first big move into streaming video, and plans to hold broadband pricing steady for the coming year.

The telco is a distant player in the New Zealand broadband market, with its 78,000 broadband customers far below that of Spark’s 700,000, Vodafone’s 400,000 and Vocus’ 200,000.

The telco is offering Amazon Prime Video as an extra for customers on its unlimited plans, which start at $85/month, or $75 for customers with a pay monthly mobile plan. Amazon Prime Video is available in New Zealand for US$5.99/month.

It will, however, only apply to new customers.

“This is a global brand that has made significant strides with exclusive and award-winning content and we’re delighted to offer that to 2degrees broadband customers,” 2degrees chief of consumer, Scott Taylor, says.

The telco is a late entrant to the video streaming market as New Zealand telcos, like those around the world, seek to bolster their revenues and offset downward price pressures on connectivity, while building customer loyalty.

New Zealand’s largest broadband provider, Spark offers its own Lightbox streaming service as well as Netflix, which is the largest internet streaming service in NZ, while Vodafone has Neon.

Spark is also firing up an online sports service, Spark Sport, open to any Kiwis, not just Spark broadband customers.

The offer is just one of several initiatives 2degrees is taking to drive its broadband uptake, with the company also announcing a freeze on its residential broadband pricing for the year. That freeze follows earlier moves from other Kiwi providers including Spark, Vodafone and Slingshot who have increased their pricing, passing on increases from network provider Chorus.

“If you’re a current 2degrees customer, we’ll swallow the costs on this one and we’ll give you our work we won’t put your prices up this year,” Taylor says of the plan.

“It’s our 10th birthday this year and being fair has always been part of the DNA at 2degrees. For us, that means thinking twice before we put prices up.”

Leave a comment

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo

You are commenting using your Google account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s