DT Vice President of Global TV and Entertainment Products Gerry O’Sullivan said his company was surprised with the increase of its new satellite customers. “Having a satellite proposition linked with IP in this hybrid solution is like having the best of both worlds,” O’Sullivan told Satellite News at the IP&TV World Forum in London. “The ability to have interactivity combined with one-to-one connectivity with our customers is truly unique, but the customers also enjoy all the efficiencies and benefits of satellite as well. Through this approach, we are reaching a whole new series of people that we have not reached before.”

   Hybrid satellite and IP offerings have become a fairly standard modus operandi among telcos during the past two years. DT currently utilizes this approach in territories such as in Germany, Hungary and Slovakia and will likely launch DTH services in most of its other markets, according to O’Sullivan, who has worked for satellite companies such as BSkyB. The move to satellite was something that DT ultimately had to do.

   “I think there was a realization that the pace of bandwidth across Europe was not going as quickly as we would all like it to go. We see our colleagues in Asia and South America leaping ahead of us,” said O’Sullivan. “What we ended up finding was that we had a large customer base which we were almost denying our service to. Our customers were basically saying: If Entertain Sat is such a great proposition, why can’t we have it? That is what we have addressed. We want to reach as many of our customers as we can.”

The challenge for telcos like DT is launch the right video service offerings to the right markets. In doing this, O’Sullivan believes a ‘quality, not quantity’ approach is the way to go.

   “What has changed is that it is not about quantity any more — it’s about quality,” he said. “Are there really the right TV propositions and TV channels out there? In the past, pay-TV operators would talk about over 400 TV channels. What has really changed is that customers want to know whether they have the channels they like in HD and SD. So, we ask ourselves if we have the right content in the right quality, as opposed to asking if we need hundreds of channels.”

   One of the big topics among pay-TV providers has Over-The-Top (OTT) television. BSkyB recently announced that its new Internet TV service, Now TV, would be offering access to Sky content on a wide range of broadband-connected devices.

   O’Sullivan said that DT already has a family of successful OTT services and is working to provide a number of services to customers in different ways. “Whether it is people wanting to consume video through their gaming consoles or through their connected devices, we will look at all of those areas. The primary focus is what is the core media product and the core triple play proposition. OTT should not be about either/or, it should be about how it complements your core offering.”           

  Because DT operates across multiple territories, it is able to witness different types of user behavior in the territories in which it operates. Not every market in Europe is the same, according to O’Sullivan.

“I was recently in Hungary, where we are starting to see some interesting effects of social networking. To respond to this market need, we have launched Facebook on our Hungarian TV service,” he said. “Some areas have really started to innovate in their home markets. When we look at Europe, we will look at those centers of excellence and spread the innovation across our European customer base. You will see that in some territories video-on-demand is very important. In other territories, being able to watch your content on multiple devices is more important.”

In his previous role at BSkyB, O’Sullivan worked on bringing one of the first 3-D TV channels to European audiences. While the initial hype surrounding 3-D TV has faded, O’Sullivan believes there is still a positive future for 3-D TV, which is why DT launched a 3-D TV offering on the Entertain platform.

“The hype on 3-D was there because we actually delivered something that had been talked about for many years. The industry was shocked that what we turned around looked so futuristic,” he said. “What really needs to happen now is that the content has got to catch up. We are starting to see that. We are starting to see more movies and sports produced in 3-D TV. The content creation path is catching up to what we are delivering to customers’ homes.”

With new technologies emerging and bandwidth demands on the rise, O’Sullivan said it is more than likely that DT’s satellite capacity needs will be increasing rather than decreasing. “Chunghwa Telecom announced that they wanted to have 20 simultaneous live streams from the Olympics, so there is a big need coming from London,” he said. “I am absolutely sure that satellite will have always a role to play. We will use satellite wherever it is applicable.”