The overwhelming impression left by this week’s Slovenian cable conference in Portoroz was of a market in transition. Yet ironically, the greatest changes appear to be happening in other sectors of the TV industry rather than cable.
Despite the existence of a significant number of operators, Slovenian cable has in the last couple of years come to be dominated by UPC. It continues to buy up smaller operators, with the only large players still not owned by the company understood to be Kabel TV and Elektro Turensek.
In the absence of a large DTH sector – TotalTV Slovenia, the country’s first dedicated satellite platform, only made its debut late last year and currently has between 10,000-12,000 subscribers – Slovenian cable’s greatest challenge undoubtedly comes from IPTV. It is a little known fact that Slovenia was one of, if not the first, country in Europe to launch an IPTV service earlier this decade.
Operated by the incumbent telco Telekom Slovenija, SiOL TV currently has in the region of 60,000 subscribers and faces competition from a service operated by the alternative carrier T-2. Two further providers – Tus Telekom and Maribor-based Amis – have also just entered the market, and the total number of IPTV homes in the country is believed to be in the region of 100,000.
This automatically makes Slovenia, though one of the smallest countries in the region in terms of population, also one of the leading IPTV markets, behind first-placed Russia and vying for second with the Czech Republic.
DTT is also now a reality in Slovenia and set to become a good deal more prominent. With a single multiplex carrying a limited number of channels already operational and covering just over half the population, the regulator is about to announce a tender for a second one. Slovenia has already opted for MPEG-4 and will in due course have three DTT multiplexes that include HD channels as part of their offer.
Faced with these changes, Slovenia’s cable industry seems to have little choice but to speed up the process of upgrading its networks to offer digital TV and other additional services.
