“Consumption of linear TV services still prevails in Romania but we can see that in major cities multi-screen platforms accessible not only from the TV but from tablets, smartphones, computers and smart TVs are gaining ground,” Sotiris Vassiliadis, head of the media & TV solutions of Ericsson for South-East Europe, told ZF in an interview.
As far as the consumer is concerned, TV means any video they can watch on any device, he added.
Ericsson will use its strong position on the local market of providers of equipment and services to telecoms and its more than 3,000 employees to expand in full gear on the segment of media & TV solutions for communications operators, content creators and local TV stations, which will have to make significant investments in the coming years to adjust to the change in viewers’ consumption habits.
The division that Vassiliadis runs provides equipment and solutions to compress video content and broadcast it via LTE and IPTV technologies, multi-screen platforms, as well as TV broadcast infrastructure or infrastructure for managing on-demand media content.
Ericsson has a strong position on the segment of video compression equipment manufactured by US-based Plexus in Romania. Customers include Telekom and RCS&RDS, but the potential of the market is much greater.
There will be 50 billion connected devices in the world by 2020, 15 billion of which capable of playing video content. Video content will account for 55% of the data traffic compared with 45% now. These trends are already visible in the region, despite a certain gap to developed markets. “It is not realistic to expect similar developments in the US and in the Balkans,” Vassiliadis said.
TV consumption in Romania, where half of the households are in rural areas, is higher than in the rest of the European countries and consumption of on-demand online video services is in its early stages.
Last year, for instance, the local online video service Seenow operated by Direct One had about 640,000 users and the number of connected devices stood at almost 500,000 per month.
However, since almost half of the 900,000 TV sold in Romania in 2014 were smart TVs, and deliveries of computers, tablets and smartphones increased at a steady pace, too, the market will change, the Ericsson official says.
He added he did not know any technical director in the telecom industry in Romania that was not worried about the data traffic increase. All operators want to have smarter networks capable of adjusting to those changes, Sotiris Vassiliadis said.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)