When it comes to international cable industry conferences, the annual event organised by the Polish Chamber of Electronic Communication (PIKE) is undoubtedly up there with the best.
This year’s conference, which was held in the city of Poznan earlier this week, was entitled Digital Europe – Digital Poland and addressed a wide range of issues. However – and perhaps surprisingly – it only briefly touched upon the two biggest ones currently occupying the Polish TV industry.
The first was the implications of the recent takeover of Aster by Liberty Global’s UPC Polska on the cable marketplace.
Instead, Simon Boyd, UPC Polska’s president, disagreed with the competition authority’s (UOKiK’s) view of what constitutes competition in the pay-TV sector, while Malgorzata Krasnodebska-Tomkiel, the latter’s president, argued that UPC Polska would have gained a dominant position in the lucrative Warsaw and Kraków markets had the deal gone ahead without any preconditions.
The second big issue was the imminent sale of TVN, one of the country’s leading commercial broadcasters. TVN board member Tomasz Berezowski confirmed – albeit indirectly – that the two front-runners to buy a majority stake in the company are Time Warner and Vivendi, though we found out little else. The deal, which will include the DTH platform n and its sister service TNK, will undoubtedly have far-reaching implications for the Polish TV industry, if not in the short then medium to long term.
Zygmunt Solorz-Zak, founder and majority shareholder of Polsat/Cyfrowy Polsat and the country’s leading media entrepreneur, makes a point of attending the PIKE conference every year and this time round spoke at some length about his enthusiasm for LTE technology. Just like the way Liberty Global views its Horizon gateway, he sees LTE as a game changer that will revolutionise the lives of all its users.
Solorz-Zak is currently in the process of acquiring the telco Poltelekom, whose interest include the mobile operator Plus, and creating a media/telco conglomerate that will use LTE technology to offer a broad range of multimedia services.
While there were no real revelations at the conference, TVN’s Tomasz Berezowski made public for the first time a new timetable for the transition to digital broadcasting that had until then only been known to a select number of people. Just as importantly, Pawel Tutka, vice president of 4vod,tv, provided some firm figures related to connected TV.
According to Tutka, sales are taking off impressively and there should be a million sets deployed in Poland by the end of this year.
The PIKE international conference is held in a different part of Poland every year and Jerzy Straszewski, the association’s president, said the next two would be in Kraków (2012) and Lódz (2013). PIKE would also like to host Cable Congress for the first time.
