La7 advertising performance boosts Telecom Italia

Telecom Italia Media (TIM) said that its La7 channel managed to maintain advertising revenues for the first quarter of 2009 in line with last year, compared with an overall decline of 16% in the TV advertising market.

MTV Italia’s revenues fell by €1.9m to €18.8m for the period, thanks to lower advertising spend.

TIM reported a reduced first quarter net loss of €17.6m, compared with a loss of €29m last year, which the group attributed in part to the sale of its loss-making pay-per-view bandwidth rental activities, part of its digital terrestrial network operation. Group revenues for the period were €48.5m, up €1.2m on the same period last year. EBITDA was negative €3.8m, compared with negative EBITDA of €13.4m last year.

However, TIM said that it would be difficult to maintain the improvement going forward, in part because of the need to renew La7 programming.