Cable operators are up to the challenge new entrants are posing to them.
“In Switzerland we developed light product, Horizon Lite, to address OTT competition,” according to Eric Tveter, CEO CE Group, Liberty Global, “and we invested in sports rights.
“That’s a big change for us. Our major competitor has used football and ice hockey exclusivity for many years. Liberty has invested in Horizon, but we have a new device coming out the Ios box, a lower cost box. User experience makes it different.
Netflix is complementary to us, we just integrated in Switzerland, after having started in England. In Germany, Unitymedia launched a deal with Maxdome. Amazon we are still evaluating.”
“In Germany we have the nice situation, where the big provider (Sky) is not competing with us. Sky has all the Bundeliga football and movie rights,” said Manuel Cubero, CEO Kabel Deutschland and CCO Vodafone Germany.
“We can cooperate with SVOD providers, such as Maxdome, that has same level as Netflix in Germany. We also launched Giga TV, our OTT platform, whereby we are taking our experience in cable and bring that to mobile services.”
Harold Rösch, CEO Melita, is faced with another competitor: pirates. One in three of subscribers to Malta’s incumbent cable TV service have an Android box, which gives access “to all channels of the world.’
In Sweden, Com hem acquired the DTT pay service Boxer. Anders Nilsson, CEO Com Hem, said: “We acquired 500,0000 customers, and try to connect them to broadband. We are currently developing a hybrid box, combing DTT, DOCSIS and IP. We will also see a we will see a service without a box.”
He is not afraid of the newcomers in the OTT space offering live linear channels “Skinny bundles are going to cost more when you add them up; we can bundle it better and cheaper and the consumer likes simplicity.”
