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CommunicAsia attracts thousands of industry visitors, conference speakers and delegates.
Image credit: CommunicAsia
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[Satellite TODAY 06-19-13] Singapore – Mediascape, the largest DTH platform operator in the Philippines, expects to become the number one player in the market this year, reaching approximately 600,000 subscribers. Annie Naval, COO and managing director, Mediascape, told SatelliteTODAY.com that the operator has ambitious subscriber targets over the next two years.
“We hope to hit a million subscribers in around 18 months. In three years time, we hope to have 1.5 to two million subscribers,” Naval said. The company also plans to launch OTT services in the next two months, as a complement to its DTH offer.
While Mediascape competes with Sky Cable in the Philippines and others in the market, Naval believes overall competition is benefiting the trade.
“The Philippines is becoming a more competitive market which is good news for the industry. However, pay-TV penetration remains below 20 percent so there is plenty of movement for growth. There is more disposable income in the country. People are hungry for data; they are hungry for video. They are a younger audience and want to be entertained,” she said.
Naval was speaking at an SES press event at CommunicAsia on June 19 where SES announced expanded deals with both Mediascape and IPMTV, a Thai satellite TV operator that uses a business model similar to that of Freeview in the U.K. to attract subscribers. Thus, it generates its money through set-top box sales and advertising on local channels on the platform, rather than traditional pay-TV subscriptions.
SES’s new Mediascape deal involves additional capacity on SES 7 and extends the companies partnership from 2016 to 2021. Additionally, MediaScape’s existing capacity on NSS 11 will be relocated to SES 7, using a total of more than 100 MHz of capacity once the relocation is complete.
IPMTV, on the other hand, has contracted additional capacity on SES 8 and renewed its multi-year capacity deal on NSS 6. SES 8 is expected to be launched later in 2013 and will be co-located with NSS 6 at the orbital location of 95 degrees east. The expanded capacity will enable IPMTV, an established satellite TV provider, to double its reach to 4 million households in Thailand by years end. It currently broadcasts more than 150 local channels to its subscribers, with 21 channels in HD.
In the press briefing, Deepak Mathur, senior vice president, commercial Asia-Pacific for SES, bought up the topic of ultra-HD, and was bullish about the prospects for the technology highlighting the important work around the HEVC standard. Mathur was confident about ultra-HD saying it would not “be a flash in the pan like 3-D TV.” He also predicted we could see around 100 ultra-HD channels by 2020, and commercial launches of channels in the near future primarily based around major sporting events such as the FIFA World Cup in Brazil next year.
Naval admitted that ultra-HD is not really on Mediascape’s roadmap right now. However, she said that once TV sets come into the market, there was a strong possibility that the company could look to launch services around the 2018 timeframe.
IPMTV is also looking to expand its operations outside of its home market of Thailand. Kreingkrai Sriananraksa, COO, IPMTV told SatelliteTODAY.com that this could lead to more capacity demand on new SES satellites such as SES 8 for Asia.
“We have eight transponders according to our existing plan. We would like to expand our business to our neighboring countries such as Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia, so we will need even more bandwidth. We will maybe need 10 transponders, so a 20 percent increase in capacity,” he said.
But in order to operate in other countries, IPMTV will need to resolve licensing issues, and Sriananraksa admitted it was more likely to be next year that the operator could launch services in these markets. In terms of the size of the opportunity, Sriananraksa said, “Myanmar would be the biggest market for us. Cambodia has around 2.8 million households. Laos has around one million households. Myanmar has around 20 million households. We are targeting 10 percent of this addressable market.”
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