ANGA CABLE – Cologne. It has taken a long time, but digital TV is now coming to cable in Germany alongside broadband internet access and telephony. The number of triple play customers is growing and finally cable can compete with the incumbent Deutsche Telekom. The mood was definitely upbeat at the big strategy session at ANGA Cable show that is better known as the “elephantenrunde” (roundtable of the elephants) and brings together the biggest names in cable and broadcasting.
Parm Sandhu, CEO of the Unitymedia group, said his company has been extremely successful with its ‘Jetzt Digital’ (Digital Now) campaign, in which the operator worked with media authorities and broadcasters to have people switch to digital. “Within a six months time span we converted 370,000 subscribers from analogue to digital. This is well over 20%.” Of these, half of them are premium TV subscribers, which bodes well for the future when more homes turn to digital
Piracy has been a big issue for Premiere, according to CEO Michael Bornicke, who hopes the new contracts with NDS and Nagravision will offer better protection, “we have decided for two suppliers, who will be in competition with each other, so we are not dependent on a single system.”
Premiere hopes to convert between 150,000 and 200,000 homes that currently have a pirate smart card to fully paid up subscribers. “In the next couple of years we hope to see significant growth.” With News Corp now well on board, the operator can benefit from the extensive knowledge the company has with pay-TV operations across the world.
Adrian von Hammerstein, CEO of Kabel Deutschland (KDG) was also pleased with his results, gaining 800,000 pay-TV subscribers as well as doubling his number of broadband connections and telephony customers.
However, one project that faltered was Entavio, the encryption system fro SES-Astra for the German market. Ferdinand Kayser, president and CEO of the operator said: “It was our intention to add addressability and facilitating transactions with the digital receiver. The cooperation with Premiere worked very well, but was perhaps not deep enough. And it turned out that in such a complicated eco-system it was difficult, not to say impossible, to let such a concept bloom.”
