Polsat mulls pay-TV solution for DTT

Polsat owner Zygmunt Solorz-Zak has said that pay-TV may be the only way to fund the deployment of set-top boxes on Polish DTT.

In an interview with Rzeczpospolita, Solorz-Zak said he believed 2010 would be the year when Poland’s much-delayed DTT platform finally launched, but that it would only be a complement to satellite. “If the state will not pay extra for the set-top boxes you have to find the funding for an alternative. It may be the introduction of pay-TV channels.”

Solorz-Zak pointed out that the MPEG-4 technology chosen for the Polish DTT system meant that the cost of receivers would be more than is the case for satellite receivers. “Today, we produce top boxes for satellite, but if there is such a demand, we can also produce others.”

Declining to comment on whether he would be interested in bidding for 2.6 GHz mobile spectrum, Solorz-Zak said he would rather not invest in mobile TV, given the availability of standard DTT content on some handsets.

Solorz-Zak indicated that Polsat’s financial results for 2009 would be lower than the previous year, but it was too early to take a final view. He said he would wait until the financial crisis passed before deciding when and where to invest, but that a new youth-skewing channel might still launch.