What does the future hold in store for Romania’s leading pay-TV operator?
While it’s certainly not a question that keeps me awake at night, I do sometimes wonder about the company, its strategy in general and plans for the future.
Just this week we reported two interesting pieces of news on RCS&RDS, one of which I must admit I found quite surprising. Hidden in the latest Telekom Austria results was that the telco had paid only Euro0.9 million for RCS&RDS’s Digi TV satellite operation in Croatia earlier this year.
It is probably likely that in disposing of its Digi TV asset in Slovakia – bought by Slovak Telecom, also earlier this year – RCS&RDS also received a similarly modest sum.
Clearly RCS&RDS’s intention is to scale back its activities outside Romania and questions must now be asked as to whether it will remain in the Czech DTH market. However, its commitment to Hungary, where it is one of the country’s leading providers of pay-TV services, looks solid.
Perhaps the biggest changes – and indeed challenges – now await RCS&RDS in its highly competitive home market, where despite being the leading cable and DTH operator it continues to face a strong challenge from both Romtelecom and UPC.
Judging by its recent performance, the latter seems to have turned a corner and in fact saw revenue growth in the first half of this year.
OTE-backed Romtelecom is meanwhile steadily adding to its TV subscriber base, which spans DTH, cable and IPTV.
RCS&RDS’s latest move in its home market was to buy the music channel Hora earlier this week. The real significance of the acquisition was probably that it was just the latest addition to what is a growing portfolio of services operated by the company that spans movies, sport, news and of course music.
While RCS&RDS is no longer a leading player in the CEE region as a whole, it will undoubtedly remain so in Romania, despite intense competition, for the foreseeable future.
