Netflix fever has hit Europe, even countries you would least expect it to.
What surprised me most at Media Platform, which took place in Budapest on September 29 and 30, was hearing that only a handful of days earlier the local press had reported, almost en masse, that the SVOD service would shortly be launching in Hungary.
Given that it is barely up and running in markets such as France and Germany, where it made its debut only last month, this initially seemed far-fetched. But after speaking with several people and attending a few panel discussions, I concluded that there must indeed by some substance to the reports – especially as they also mentioned Italy and Poland, two more likely candidates for Netflix at this stage of its European rollout.
OTT, it has to be said, is still in its infancy in Hungary. To the best of my knowledge, the only companies to currently operate services are the incumbent Magyar Telekom (TV Go), cable operator Tarr, HFC Technics (Seta) and EuroCable Magyarország (ITT/OTT TV), the latter having only launched at the beginning of this month.
Speaking with Ferenc Kéry, the president of the Hungarian Cable Communications Association, who hosted Media Platform 2014, I found out that operators see OTT, which is still unregulated, as a threat. The best solution for them is to therefore reach agreements with providers and offer the services free of charge to their subscribers.
Speaking specifically about Netflix, he said if it delayed launching in Hungary by one or two years there may no longer be a market for it. Furthermore, whenever the service does indeed launch, it will find the language barrier very huge. English is only widely spoken by young people, especially in their 20s, and so all content offered by Netflix would have to be dubbed into Hungarian.
It will be interesting to see how things look in a year’s time, but my feeling is that Netflix will by then indeed also be available in Hungary, along with such other regional markets as Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
