2008 is turning out to be a pivotal year for digital terrestrial broadcasting in Estonia.
It began with the platform ZUUMtv, which made its debut just over 12 months earlier in December 2006, adding FTA channels to an offer that had previously consisted of only pay services in order to secure more subscribers. Now, it is about to see a major change of ownership, with EDTV, the platform’s holding company, being taken over by Starman, Estonia’s leading cable operator.
ZUUMtv was one of the first fully operational DTT operations in CEE, and one of the few in Europe as a whole to opt for MPEG-4 compression. Yet despite already being able to reach 93% of the population at the end of 2007, it had only secured in the region of 6,500 subscribers.
There were several reasons for this, the most obvious one being the lack of local content in ZUUMtv’s offer. The platform’s disappointing performance also seemed to contrast with that of DigiTV, an IPTV service operated Eesti Telekom’s Elion, which was – along with Elion’s cable operation – already claiming 63,200 subscribers at the end of Q1 this year.
While ZUUMtv’s problems have to some degree been rectified, with the subscriber total having risen to 16,500, it still looks unlikely to secure the 50,000 customers it was hoping for by the end of this year. Indeed, it is now being reported that the platform aims to reach this figure within two years.
Starman has made no secret of the fact that ZUUMtv, in which it already held a majority (66%) stake through EDTV prior to taking it over, has had a negative impact in its financial results. While expecting this to continue for a while yet, in the long term it feels ZUUMtv will “strengthen the company’s market position and profitability”.
This is certainly the start of a new phase for ZUUMtv. Something of a pioneer in the region’s digital TV sector, its fate will undoubtedly be followed closely in other countries planning or about to launch their own DTT platforms.
