Photo: Tricolor TV

[Via Satellite 03-30-2016] Russian pay-TV operator Tricolor TV has increased its number of High Definition (HD) subscribers from 6.6 million to 7 million between now and January 1. The company reports that more than 59 percent of its subscriber base is connected to HD television.

Currently, 100 percent of new connections to Tricolor TV belong to HDTV subscribers. A significant percentage of growth is the result of an initiative to replace MPEG-2 with MPEG-4 HDTV-receivers. Tricolor TV started this replacement effort in cooperation with strategic partners. The company plans to change over all its MPEG-2 subscribers to HDTV before 2017.

“Changeover to MPEG-4 and HD is a predictable stage of evolutionary development of the pay-TV market. The number of MPEG-2 TV channels has strongly decreased. This format is essentially obsolete. Several hundreds of HDTV channels are available worldwide. We make our best efforts to provide the opportunity to evaluate the new level of TV viewing stipulated by the laws of the Russian Federation to all our subscribers,” said Mikhail Goryachev, chief content officer at Tricolor TV.