“The project to launch TV services is currently being reviewed and Orange is already talking with content providers about it. No decision has been made yet,” a source close to the company who has knowledge of the talks told ZF.
“Orange had planned to launch TV services this year, but postponed the decision. The company is considering satellite TV services, which can be launched fast. Remember Romtelecom, which launched the Dolce satellite TV service in 2006, six months after getting it greenlighted by the management,” another communications industry source told ZF.
Orange did not provide any comment about the information when asked by ZF.
Still, Orange Romania’s chief executive, Jean Francois Fallacher, did not deny the company might launch a satellite TV service when asked directly about it at the ZF Digital’ 12 event organized by Ziarul Financiar. He did not make a clear announcement about it, either, merely saying Orange customers would be able to watch TV on their mobile devices.
Fallacher believes TV services will become increasingly more important, though not necessarily entail using a TV for viewing but also a smartphone or a tablet.
Orange Romania’s customers can already watch about 17 local and international TV stations on smartphones and tablets, in exchange for a fee.
If it adds TV services, Orange, with its 10 million users, might become a fierce competitor for RCS&RDS and Cosmote & Romtelecom, which provide the entire range of landline and mobile services, plus cable, satellite TV and Internet.
RCS&RDS first made a name for itself as a cable and satellite TV provider and then expanded into mobile telephony and Internet services, where it became an aggressive competitor with a customer base of several million people. The company, which rarely publishes information about its customer base and never reveals its strategic plans, has grown significantly and discreetly on the mobile Internet market.
This March RCS&RDS’ development director Valentin Popoviciu said the industry mistakenly saw his company only as a force to be reckoned with on the landline Internet business.
“There were 970,000 Internet connections via USB modems in June 2011, according to ANCOM (communications industry regulator i.e.) and we accounted for 320,000 of them. We therefore had more than 30% of the market even though our resources were lower than the other players’. We now have half a million connections.”
The TV services market stood at EUR370 million in 2011. RCS&RDS is the leading provider (more than 3 million customers), followed by Romtelecom (1.2 million) and UPC (more than 1.1 million). The three account for about 90% of the total number of subscribers.
Market regulator ANCOM data show there were 5.85 million TV service subscribers at the end of 2011, 3.57 million of whom were cable TV subscribers and 2.26 million were satellite TV subscribers.
TV is a mandatory service for a telecom operator in Romania, considering the high consumption of such services in this country, said Stefanos Theocharopoulos, chief executive officer of Cosmote and Romtelecom, at ZF Digital ’12.
Eighty three percent of Romanians watch TV everyday and they prefer news (81%), while 29% of the TV viewers never watch cultural and art shows, according to a survey conducted by IRES. A Mediascope survey showed Romanians watch TV for more than 21 hours a week, more than then spend on the Internet (almost 19 hours a week), listening to radio (15.6 hours) or reading newspapers (5.4 hours).
Information about Orange planning to go into the TV business gained credibility after Miroslaw Smyk, the manager who supervised Romtelecom’s strong expansion into the TV market in December 2007 – June 2010, was seen entering the building that houses Orange’s Romanian headquarters.
Smyk stayed in Romania after his stint with Romtelecom ended and opened his own TV consultancy company. He could not be reached and asked whether he had provided advice to Orange about launch of TV services or not.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)