James Murdoch, chief executive of BSkyB, has highlighted his commitment to ITV, as his company reported an operating profit of £143 million for the first quarter on the back of strong uptake of its broadband offering.

Speaking at BSkyB's annual general meeting and results presentation, Mr Murdoch said that BSkyB was "a long-term investor" in ITV, although he refused to comment further on the situation.

The UK’s largest pay-TV operator — 39.1 per cent owned by News Corporation, parent company of The Times and Times Online — last year scuppered Virgin Media's takeover battle of ITV when the group bought a 17.9 per cent stake in ITV, subsequently blocking the deal. Earlier this month the Competition Commission provisionally found that BSkyB’s 17.9 per cent share in terrestrial broadcaster ITV was against the public interest.

The Commission concluded that BSkyB’s shareholding in ITV would “be likely to lead to a substantial lessening of competition by giving it the ability to influence ITV’s strategy.”

BSkyB added 83,000 net new subscribers to its pay-TV service in the first quarter and improved its retention of customers thanks to the popularity of its personal video recorder, Sky+.

The company now has 8.67 million customers, in what is another step towards reaching its target of 10 million subscribers by 2010. It was above analyst expectations of 81,000 additions.

BSkyB said subscriber growth was buoyed by record Sky+ sales of 323,000, up 14 per cent to 2.697 million, as well as high definition growth of 66,000, up 23 per cent to 358,000.

Sales of Multiroom – having more than one Sky box in the home – were also strong, up 68,000 or 5 per cent to 1.411 million.

Churn, the number of customers that left the service during the quarter, hit its lowest level for five quarters, dropping to 11.3 per cent, a reduction of 0.8 per cent from the previous quarter. BSkyB’s long-term goal is to bring churn down to 10 per cent.

Mr Murdoch said: "We've seen continued good demand from customers for our entire product range, with over 1 million product sales for the fourth consecutive quarter. Sky+ has been exceptional, growing faster than ever before, and is now enjoyed by almost one third of BSkyB TV customers.”

BSkyB posted an 11 per cent rise in revenues to £1.18 billion. This included £46 million from Sky Talk and Sky Broadband and £40 million from Easynet Enterprise.

Shares were trading down almost 4 per cent to 663p.

BSkyB strode into the competitive broadband market over a year ago and announced earlier this week that it had reached 1 million broadband customers. The group has a 2010 target of 3 million customers.

In the first quarter Sky Talk had 153,000 new customers, up 29 per cent to 679,000.

Average revenue per user (ARPU) declined, as expected, by £1 to £411, because of the loss of pay-per-view Premier League game service PremPlus. This is expected to be offset for the rest of the financial year through future sales of broadband and telephony.

Subscription revenue growth was hit by the expense of the Barclays Premier League contract as well as the battle with rival Virgin, which resulted in the non-renewal of the agreement to supply Sky’s basic channels to the Sir Richard Branson-backed cable group.

BSkyB said that advertising revenues remained flat at £78 million, with growth in the overall television advertising sector offsetting the impact from the non-renewal of the contract to supply Sky’s basic channels to Virgin Media customers.

However, the company estimates that operating profit will take a £15 million hit for each full quarter that the channels remain off the Virgin platform.

Chief executive James Murdoch said: "We expect that performance for the full year will be in line with our plans."

At the BSkyB annual meeting today, the Pensions and Investments Research Consultants (PIRC) is to vote against the re-election of chairman Rupert Murdoch and oppose the remuneration report.

The group expressed the same concerns ahead of last year’s annual meeting where both resolutions were voted through by more than 97 per cent of shareholders.

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