Content remains King, and for cable he’s back from gardening leave, writes Julian Clover
Over the past few years the cable clarion call of triple play for all has grown ever louder. In some cases the noise has been so great that it has been hard to distinguish the marketing offers from those of the telcos so often labelled the enemy.
First came the alternative telco offers followed by internet, initially just dial-up, but now more than capable of ramping up the speeds to full blown broadband. Annika Sten-Parson, head of sales, products and marketing, Com Hem has identified that the TV message may be getting lost amongst the new offers. An experienced marketing professional, but a relative newcomer to the cable TV sector, she believes that the TV message is not as powerful as it once was. Last week Sten-Parson told the CTAM EuroSummit that although the Swedish cablenet will continue to work with the other two strands of the triple play offer, TV will become increasingly important.
No more important than the rise of on demand television, Virgin Media, UPC and Telenet have all produced substantial figures on the uptake of their various VOD offers. Millions of video streams is arguably as meaningless as it is impressive, but the percentage of subscribers that use the various services is climbing all the time, and in the case of Virgin Media this has already reached 50%. Virgin even took a break from the relentless promotion of its broadband services to advertise the availability of the BBC iPlayer to its customer’s TV screens.
Depending on the market, cablenets may feel more or less obliged to shout the virtues of their TV services. The spur is undoubtedly IPTV, though its importance varies considerably from market to market, and Sweden with Telia’s set-top giveaway is under more pressure than most. Top of the irony checklist here is Telia’s ownership of large parts of the cable infrastructure on which Com Hem is built.
As a new platform the customer has no pre-conceptions as to what the offer might be. The what you want, when you want it mantra may be well trodden on the conference floor, but to the consumer it is rather exciting. Cable therefore has to shout just as loud to say that it too can deliver.
The problem is that many other platforms can also make the same claim. The rise of the hybrid box, already in place through NDS at Canal+ France, and plans for similar services at Freeview and Freesat suggest we may have a new battlefront emerging.
