Hawaiian Telcom’s earnings fell 24.8 percent in the fourth quarter as it invested in its infrastructure to add more customers for its television and high-speed Internet services.

The company said Thursday that net income for the fourth quarter was $2 million, or 19 cents a share, compared with $2.6 million, or 23 cents a share, in the fourth quarter of 2013.

Revenue slipped 0.9 percent to $99.6 million from $100.5 million in the year-ago period.

The utility, which launched its TV service on July 1, 2011, added more than 2,300 subscribers during the quarter to increase its total to 28,100.

"Hawaiian Telcom TV will be critical in helping drive market share gain in broadband," Hawaiian Telcom Chief Financial Officer Bob Reich said in an analysts’ conference call following the release of earnings.

The company said the decrease in net income was due to a $2 million increase in depreciation and amortization tied to significant investments made to the company’s broadband network.

Hawaiian Telcom is gradually adding to the neighborhoods where its TV service is available for purchase. At the end of 2014, the service was offered to 160,000 homes on Oahu — an increase of 8,000 households for the quarter.

The company’s legacy business continued to offset the increased revenue from its TV subscribers as Hawaiian Telcom’s land-line revenue declined 5.7 percent in the fourth quarter from the year-earlier period.

Despite the negative impact to land-line sales, the company continues to invest in new technology, including fiber networks and cloud solutions, Hawaiian Telcom Chief Executive Officer Eric Yeaman said.

"As we have discussed before, companies are making less direct investments in equipment and shifting to more hosted and cloud solutions and we are a big beneficiary of this trend, but it is impacting legacy equipment revenue," Yeaman said. "We have now successfully completed the third year of our five-year, next-generation fiber build on Oahu. We have invested and executed aggressively, creating new growth channels that will be the catalyst for driving future revenue growth and putting us on track to deliver significant free cash flow beginning in 2017."

With the "fiber build," Hawaiian Telcom added 600 consumer subscribers in the fourth quarter to its high-speed Internet business for a total of 92,900 subscribers.

"On Oahu, where the majority of our consumer (high-speed Internet) subscribers are located and where the focus of our next-generation fiber network investment has been, we continue to see increased adoption of higher speed offerings, which is driving meaningful year-over-year growth," Reich said.

Yeaman said the increase in TV and high-speed Internet subscribers and additional features of the company’s service led to a 2.6 percent increase in consumer revenue to $37.4 million.

"Our momentum in the consumer channel is powered by the continued strength of Hawaiian Telcom TV and high-speed Internet, which drove our industry-leading growth in consumer revenues in 2014," he said. "The strong subscriber growth, along with a 5.8 percent year-over-year increase in monthly video (average revenue per user), was the driver for the increase in video revenue. Also, additional drivers have been higher levels of penetration of premium add-on services like sports and movie packages and HD and DVR services."

For the year, Hawaiian Telcom’s net income declined 22.8 percent to $8.1 million, or 72 cents a share, from $10.5 million, or 95 cents a share, in 2013. The company’s revenue for the year was $390.7 million — virtually flat with $391.2 million a year ago.

Separately, the company reported in a regulatory filing Thursday that Yeaman received total compensation of $1.98 million in 2014. He had a base salary of $724,154, stock awards of $744,035, incentive compensation of $485,750 and other compensation equaling $29,188.