The company's chief executive for Singapore, Mr Allen Lew, said SingTel will compete aggressively to acquire the rights to content when they become available, now that it has experience at running the service - and a customer base.

It will also make a renewed bid for the crown jewels of pay TV - the hugely popular English Premier League (EPL) football matches, currently sewn up by rival StarHub - when it becomes available in 2010.

Mr Lew, who was speaking at a media conference on SingTel's third-quarter results on Tuesday, declined to disclose the size of the group's war chest that is available for buying content.

He said he was happy with the progress being made by its pay TV service, mio TV, which picked up 17,000 new subscribers in the quarter ended Dec 31, up from 10,000 in the preceding quarter. It was launched in July.

Archrival StarHub's cable TV service, though, continues to be the Republic's dominant pay TV service, with nearly 500,000 subscribers.

Analysts have said StarHub's continued dominance of pay TV is one of its key advantages over rivals SingTel and M1, as this allows it to bundle other services with pay TV.

Maintaining its stranglehold on pay TV content, however, has not come cheap.

Just last year, StarHub paid an estimated $250 million to buy exclusive EPL coverage - four times what it paid previously. It then raised prices for its sports channels - to public outcry.

Mr Lew said that while content acquisition is important, it will be careful not to overpay.

Read the full report in Tuesday's edition of The Straits Times.