Montreal: Astral Communications reports first-half revenues are up 44% to $206.4 million. The company says the sharp hike is mainly attributable to higher home video sales and broadcast revenues, the latter based on a big increase in dth subscribers, and fully consolidated contributions from Family Channel and Teletoon.

‘On the cable side, our specialty services have achieved an 82% penetration rate on the French-language tier, and are above 50% on the English-language third tier,’ says Astral president and ceo Ian Greenberg. He says Astral’s pay-tv networks, TMN-The Movie Network and Super Ecran, have achieved ‘an exceptionally high penetration rate on the dth services.’

Astral chairman Andre Bureau says while the February merger of technical service providers AstralTech and Groupe Covitec ‘has had virtually no effect on the results of our first half,’ he believes it will add value to Astral in the long run.

Astral reports net earnings rose 26% to $6.7 million for the six months ended Feb. 28 from $5.3 million for the same period in ’98. On a per share basis, earnings for the first half increased 20% to $0.48. Leo Rice-Barker