It’s been an eventful week for Slovakia’s TV industry, and in particular the Kosice-based company Antik Telecom.
It made the headlines by announcing plans to launch an interactive DTH platform in the first quarter of 2015 and a new mobile OTT platform in early December. At the same time, it also announced the launch of a new box, the SmartTVBox Nano, to receive the latter service.
These are heady times for Antik Telecom. Established in 1999, it currently operates its own network, in eastern and central parts of Slovakia, through which it provides telco services, including fibre-optic and wi-fi broadband and digital TV, to around 50,000 households.
Just as importantly, its sister company, which has a global presence, develops, manufactures and distributes digital TV reception equipment.
Antik Telecom’s new DTH platform, appropriately named ANTIKSat, will enter an already crowded Slovak market served by the likes of Skylink, operated by Luxembourg-based M7 Group; Slovak Telekom’s New Digi TV and New Magio Sat; and UPC DTH’s freeSAT.
Yet it appears to have no intention of co-operating with any of these services, electing to use Eutelsat 16 at 16 degrees East and selling itself as a hybrid satellite internet TV service.
Indeed, its offer will initially consist of 100 satellite and 50 internet channels, with a third of these channels being in HD. The latter, it says, is more than that provided by any other platform in the country.
If ANTIKSat makes an impact on the marketplace, so, too, will almost certainly Antik Telecom’s new mobile OTT service Antik TV Go. Due to launch in the first week of December, it will offer viewers up to 47 channels – some, for the first time ever on a mobile platform, regional services – and effectively be “a fully-fledged alternative to watching live broadcasts with a wide variety of genres”.
Eventful times, indeed, for a market that rarely finds itself in the spotlight.
