Eutelsat Kabelkiosk to expand services

ANGA CABLE – Cologne. New content and bouquets are part of the extended services that the German Eutelsat Kabelkiosk is offering to small and medium sized cable operators in the country. With immediate effect a package of 15 pay radio channels from Technisat is being offered, including special thematic channels as well as spoken word, said managing director Martina Rutenbeck at the Anga Cable.

A new German sports channel offering handball, volleyball and other sports as well as “fun sports” will be added, but Rutenbeck could not name the channel at this moment. Polish programming from ITVN is being beefed up and will now have its own dedicated transponder. The cultural K3 channel from Rhineland Palatina is the first regional channel to be added to the line-up.

The Kabelkiosk services will also have a new branding, gone are the various bouquet names such as tividi digital and tvidi sports and visAvision; from June onwards all the bouquets will be called Kabelvision, Family, Sport and International respectively. The current offer consists of a family package of 11 channels, a sports package of 7 channels and 13 bouquets with a total of 30 channels for nine different language groups.

Until now cable operators acted as resellers for the Kabelvision services, but from now on Kabelvision can also provision this service for the operator and take care of subscription management, smart card and reciever distribution. “Until now cable operators do the marketing and sales themselves, but they don’t always want to do that,” said Rutenbeck.

The company also announced that in the past year it has managed to almost double the number of distribution partners from around 100 to over 190, in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Luxembourg and Denmark. However, no subscriber number has been announced.