BSkyB, Rupert Murdoch’s satellite broadcaster, on Wednesday said it planned to invest 250 million pounds (400 million dollars, euros) in the Internet, as it unveiled a drastic slide in profits.

The investment will come within the next 18 months and will be directed at the company’s sky.com and skysports.com Internet ventures in a bid to cement the company’s hold over new media in Britain, as it has done in pay television here.

Sky said that it plans to become the leading sports Internet site in Britain within a year. It already has exclusive rights to broadcast live Premiership soccer in Britain.

The company also said that it is working with British Telecom on plans to supply Sky content over BT’s Cellnet mobile phone network.

The Internet strategy was unveiled as the company revealed a pre-tax loss of 61.5 million pounds in the six months to January, compared with a profit of 53.2 million pounds at the same time last year.

The company board said there would be no interim dividend payment, compared with the 2.75 pence per share seen at the same time last year.

There was a loss per share of 2.8 pence over the half-year, compared to previous earnings per share of 2.3 pence.

In spite of the profits slide, BSkyB stock rose by 191.5 pence to 1,802 pence in early trading on the London market.

The paltry results were provoked in part by the cost of attracting new subscribers to BSkyB’s digital television network.

The company said that it has signed up 2.6 million takers for its digital television services since their launch in 1998.

While revenue increased by 13 percent to 849.7 million pounds, this was more than offset by a rise of 176 million pounds in costs to 821.9 million pounds.

The company paid out 123.9 million pounds in acquiring the 699,000 new subscribers won during the period. In addition to increased marketing costs, the company was forced to match its main digital rival, the OnDigital consortium, in giving decoder boxes to potential users free of charge.

Operating profits crashed to 27.8 million pounds from 107.2 million pounds.