This week’s Broadband TV News/Telenor Satellite Broadcasting Business Breakfast confirmed what most of us knew all along: Romania is a market on the move.
While by no means the largest in CEE, it certainly boasts some impressive statistics, especially in the cable and satellite sectors. The former, though falling in terms of subscriber numbers (230,000 in 2007, according to figures supplied by the National Audiovisual Council – CNA), still serves just over 3.5 million TV homes, or 50% of the total.
Satellite is meanwhile growing rapidly in popularity, with no fewer than five platforms now serving the country. Last year alone, the number of DTH subscribers rose from 0.6 million to 1.7 million, with RCS/RDS’s Digi TV (56%) and the incumbent telco Romtelecom’s Dolce (27%) accounting for the lion’s share of the total. Today, the number of DTH homes probably stands at closer to 2 million.
DTH services are certainly affordable, with most platforms offering free installation, reception equipment in escrow and basic packages that cost less than RON15 (€4) a month. Not that cable subscriptions are that much more expensive, with Romania being an extremely price-sensitive market.
Although the country’s two leading cable operators UPC and RCS/RDS both offer digital TV services, UPC’s are limited to Bucharest and former subscribers of Astral Telecom, which the company acquired in a deal worth nearly €340 million in October 2005.
The situation has some parallels with the one that existed until last year in the Czech Republic, where UPC inherited Karneval’s digital cable subscribers before launching its own service. UPC’s Romanian operation will be hoping it can emulate its Czech counterpart’s subsequent success when it, too, rolls out a digital offer in the next two months.
The undoubted dominance of cable and DTH in Romania must raise some question marks as to the future prospects of both IPTV and DTT. Both will in due course establish a presence in the marketplace, though securing customers will be no easy matter.
