Russia’s Gazprom Media has formed a company named Alcazar Content Service (ACS) that allows regional TV channels to access its TV content.
The latter includes output from Central Partnership, NTV-Kino, Comedy Club Production, GoodStory Media, Red Media and NTV-Plus, as well as the channels NTV, TNT, TV-3, Pyatnitsa, Match TV and 2×2. ACS has already formed a package of offers that consists of mainly (75%) Russian-produced movies and TV series.
Separately, the audience for thematic pay-TV channels in Russia grew by 61% in the period 2011-2015, according to Dmitry Kolesov, the director of the department of TV and content, J’son & partners.
Speaking at an event organised by Viasat and quoted by ComNews and AKTR, he added that the most popular pay-TV channels offer movies and TV series. Indeed, 85% of the total demand for pay-TV is for movies, children’s, educational and entertainment programmes.
Kolesov identified the five most popular channels as TV1000 Russian Cinema, TV1000, My Planet, Discovery Channel and Animal Planet.
He also said that there is increasing demand for video content accessible on mobile devices. As of last year, there were 81.8 million smartphones and tablets in use in Russia, with the number set to almost double to 150.5 million by 2018.
