Here’s something to terrify the beancounters at PBL Media. Foxtel is now more profitable than the struggling Nine Network stations of PBL Media.

PBL Media owns the Nine stations in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane — those three markets account for well over 80% of the metro market ad spend in Australia each year.

The Pay TV business, 25% owned by PBL which will be kept and inserted into Consolidated Media Holdings when the Packer split comes, said it earned $237 million on an earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortisation (EBITDA) basis for the 2007 year to June.

That was up 40% on a year ago.

Besides PBL, Foxtel is 25% owned by News Corp, which didn’t refer to the results of the Pay TV business in its results issued in the US, even though it has the right to appoint the management.

Broad details of the Foxtel performance were contained in the Telstra accounts and earnings statement for 2007, issued today to the ASX. Foxtel later issued a statement.

We will know how Nine has gone in the next couple of weeks when PBL posts its 2007 results. (The question will be how much information will be disclosed though with PBL selling half, and then another 25% pf PBL Media to CVC during the financial year).

Nine earned around $215 million in 2006 on the same basis and reported a fall in the half year to December of around 5%, to $137 million (excluding a profit on a property transaction).

As the first half of the year is more profitable for TV than the second half, Nine won’t be able to match Foxtel.

PBL revealed in its interim report in February that Foxtel had EBITDA of $100 million “and trending upwards” It more than doubled in the second half.

Likewise, Foxtel could go close to surpassing the Ten Network’s EBITDA, but especially its TV EBITDA. Ten’s financial year finishes at the end of this month. Ten’s 9 month EBITDA for the whole group was $186 million. While TV accounts for much of that, Eye Corp, the out of home advertising business, is a growing part of earnings.

Foxtel should be second to Seven in profitability in broadcast media, in terms of gross earnings. But its gross profit margins are around 16.5%, less than half those of Ten and Seven.

Foxtel said it posted a record $76m profit (before tax and refinancing charges, after depreciation and interest and including joint ventures) up from last year’s maiden profit of $4million.

It said it had 1,292,000 direct subscribers (including the sales queue), at June 30, up 13.1% on June 30, 2006. Foxtel said its total subscriber base, including wholesale customers, grew to 1,443,000 an increase of 12.4% over the 12 month period.

It said the “combination of strong subscriber growth and improved ARPU delivered a 13% increase in subscriber revenue to $1.23b while total revenues reached $1.42b”

ARPU isn’t a character in The Simpsons, it’s the key measure for all subscription or customer-based businesses: it means average revenue per user.

Telstra said it rose 3% on 2006, but neither it nor Foxtel gives a figure. Austar, the regional Pay TV does and says it rose 2.9% in the second quarter to $76.36 for residential subscribers.