Hungary has long been a key market in Central and Eastern Europe for foreign media companies.
HBO, for instance, chose it as the first country outside the US to expand to almost a quarter of a century ago, and it has since been followed by a multitude of others including CME, RTL, AMC, Sony and SPI, to name but a few.
It was my pleasure earlier this week to attend and participate in an event known as Media Hungary. Held in Siófok, a small town by Lake Balaton, it was probably the local equivalent of the UK’s Edinburgh Festival – the place to be for all the movers and shakers in the Hungarian media industry.
Though being gradually given more of an international flavour through guest speakers, Media Hungary is still very much a Hungarian affair and therefore offers key insights into all aspects of the industry, perhaps otherwise not available to outsiders.
The first thing that has to be said is that Hungary, while no trailblazer, is a market that is more than keeping up with others in the CEE, and indeed the rest of Europe.
Take OTT. The NMHH decided late last year to launch a much-needed public consultation into such services, the background and preliminary results of which we report on in this week’s Broadband TV News. The full findings, I was personally told, will be made available in English in two months time.
As elsewhere in CEE, despite the absence of international players like Netflix and Amazon, OTT is already a reality. This was more than amply demonstrated by presentations from a number of companies providing services including Magyar Telekom, Telenor and Vodafone.
However, there are also a number of controversial issues in the industry, some of which were touched on in presentations. We cover one such issue – the possible introduction of a ‘Google tax’ on international internet-based companies – in this week’s Broadband TV News.
All in all, the impression left by Media Hungary on an outsider such as myself was one of a market that despite its difficulties has a promising future.
