This year’s PIKE international conference and exhibition was held at a new congress centre (ICE) in the city of Kraków and took as its theme Towards a Digital Single Market.
Longer than usual, with conference sessions spanning the course of three days, it got under way in earnest with a presentation by Guy Bisson, from the recently formed research company Ampere Analysis, and was followed by a semi-international panel that included speakers from (amongst others) ANGA, Cable Europe and the Euroasian Association of Cable Television.
What was particularly interesting about the panel was that it in providing a CEE view of the Digital Single Market (DSM) it looked beyond the EU. For instance, Mikhail Silin from the Euroasian Association of Cable Television spoke about the situation in Russia and how its regulatory issues, though not overseen by Brussels, are probably similar to those in EU countries.
There was also an important point made in the panel – and one that would also be mentioned in subsequent discussions – about the threat posed to cable operators by the likes of Google and Amazon, rather than the much talked about Netflix, that could leave them as little more than a dumb pipe.
The DSM was examined in much detail on the second day of the conference, from the perspectives of business, regulation and copyright. The business one was particularly interesting as it featured a panel discussion that included heads of some of the Polish industry’s leading players. The general impression one got was that there are mixed feelings about the DSM, with those players seeing both positives and possible negatives for their respective businesses.
Zygmunt Solorz-Zak, the founder and head of Polsat, made some telling comments, some of which were to resonate later in the conference. One in particular, that you cannot make people pay for something that they are used to receiving for free, stuck in my and many other people’s minds.
There were a number of standout sessions on both the second and final days. They included a presentation by and interview with Phillip Luff, whose company Scripps is now a hugely important player in the Polish market through the acquisition of TVN; a summary of a report on the Polish cable market produced by PwC in cooperation with PIKE; and a presentation by Georg Tacke, the CEO of Simon-Kucher & Partners.
All in all, one was left with the impression that the theme of PIKE 2015 will probably feature even more prominently in future conferences involving the chamber. It will, of course, be hosting Cable Congress, for the first time ever in Poland, next summer.