These are heady days indeed for Cyfrowy Polsat, which with Digi TV vies for top spot in the Central and East European DTH marketplace.
Results published by the Polish platform earlier this week show that it ended the first quarter with 2.19 million subscribers – an increase of 50% on the total just 12 months earlier. In Q1 alone it added 119,000 new customers, and currently Cyfrowy Polsat has around twice as many as Cyfra+, Poland’s second largest platform.
All this comes only days after Cyfrowy Polsat held a successful and heavily over-subscribed IPO that will provide it with funding to upgrade its infrastructure and become a MVNO later this year. Not that its financial performance has until now been lacking, with a year-on-year increase in revenues to March 31 of 37% telling its own positive story.
And yet, to add a little realism to the situation, the platform’s president Dominik Libicki has warned that its subscriber growth is now certain to slow down. Moreover, it cannot expect a sudden surge of new customers this summer for Euro 2008, which will be shown exclusively and in HD by Cyfrowy Polsat.
Interestingly, the platform has just introduced a pre-pay offer providing viewers with SD or HD decoders, along with access of up to six months to some of its programme packages. The move, Libicki concedes, is aimed at attracting subscribers away from Poland’s two other DTH platforms.
Cyfrowy Polsat has certainly come a long way since it began life as a low-end service, giving away decoders and providing what could best be described as a modest channel offer. ITI Group’s new generation platform n forced both it and Cyfra+ to considerably raise their game, much to the benefit of the DTH viewing public as a whole.
However, its future is inextricably linked to that of parent company Polsat and owner Zygmunt Solorz-Zak. Having ultimately rejected an offer by Axel Springer to buy a 25.1% stake in Polsat last year, Solorz-Zak has brought on board a long-standing ally named Heronim Ruta as a shareholder.
Ruta is understood to have played a key role in the successful Cyfrowy Polsat IPO and will undoubtedly help steer Polsat through the increasingly choppy waters that are Poland’s TV marketplace.
Polsat, and indeed its DTH platform Cyfrowy Polsat, will certainly be worth keeping an eye on in the months to come.
