Boxer has secured the right to run Ireland’s pay DTT service, but with 76% of the country already watching multichannel TV is cannibalisation the inevitable consequence, writes Julian Clover.
Ten years ago the launch of DTT in the UK had everything, more channels, first division football, Ulrika Johnson, and a pay-TV service few wanted. Across the Irish Sea, Boxer was this week unveiled as the company that would run the country’s three multiplex DTT service. The Teracom-owned operator has already been awarded the concession to run a pay-TV service in neighbouring Denmark, having pulled Sweden out of an initial DTT wobble to reach in excess of 700,000 subscribers.
Ireland will also have a single free to air multiplex operated by the public broadcaster RTE and carrying the existing terrestrial line-up including the commercial network, named entertainingly for Boxer’s Swedish owners, TV3 and the Gaelic language TG4.
The UK by contrast has through Freeview around 40 free-to-air TV channels largely driven by the four public broadcasters. Instantly my mind went back to my travels around Ireland in the mid 1980s. Before the true advent of multichannel television, residents on the east coast and those within reach of the North had installed giant TV aerials to pick up the signals from the British mainland.
While it seems unlikely that history will repeat itself, though I wouldn’t mind a return to the days of Sunshine and Radio Nova, but what makes the Irish market different to the UK?
Every territory is different; both in terms of the economic spending power of its population, and perhaps more significantly the position of those pay-TV operators already in the market.
Broadly speaking the larger television markets, the UK, France, Germany, have free-to-air DTT platforms, perhaps with a small pay-TV element. The smaller markets, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway rely largely on a pay-TV service. It will be the lessons here that will help Boxer position itself in the market. No one will be surprised if the offer includes channels from Sky and Setanta. The added question is whether RTE’s free offer will be strong enough to encourage people to upgrade to DTT. The increasing number of integrated sets available on the market will help the conversions along.
The problem here is that Ireland is on the edge of being a mature market; 320,400 of UPC Ireland’s 578,600 subscribers already have a digital service with all the features one might expect. The same goes for Sky, where there are 548,000 subscribers, in a market of only 1.46 million TV households. At 76% the percentage of subscribers receiving multichannel TV is already significant.
