Hungary is the latest country to be hit by the HD revolution sweeping Central and Eastern Europe (CEE).
Just three months ago, UPC, its leading cable operator, began to roll out a long-awaited digital TV service, offering subscribers a number of new channels including National Geographic HD, Eurosport HD and HBO HD. And earlier this week, Antenna Digital, the MMDS service operated by the national transmission company Antenna Hungária in Budapest and environs, announced that it had added the same HD channels to its offer.
What is more, the public broadcaster Magyar Televizió (MTV) is using the upcoming Beijing Olympic Games to kick-start its adoption of HD. According to information supplied to Broadband TV News by the station, its two channels will start airing programming in the format during the Games and continue to do so once they are over. Perhaps more significantly, by this time next year it expects to be making all of its programming, including news, in HD.
The developments in Hungary reflect what is now going on in the region as a whole. It is perhaps hard to believe that the first HD services were introduced in CEE as recently as October 2006 by the Polish new generation DTH platform n and six months later were only also being offered by Russia’s NTV-Plus. Since then, they have become commonplace, especially in the larger and more developed markets, with some companies, such as the Polish MSO Aster, already offering up to 10 channels in the format.
Leading local broadcasters are also turning to HD and in some instances even launching channels in the format. Poland’s TVP, for instance, will give a debut to such a service ahead of the Beijing Olympics and then change it into a general HD channel once they are over.
We can with some confidence predict that come Euro 2012 and the London Olympics, HD will be firmly established across in CEE.
