This year’s NEM in Dubrovnik was arguably the best in the event’s history to date.
Certainly from a news perspective, Broadband TV News was able to report on important developments at Telekom Austria, Discovery and Vivacom. The conference sessions, including one on Big Data moderated by Broadband TV News, also provided valuable insights into the current state of the TV industry in CEE and perhaps even more importantly its direction of travel.
Telekom Austria was able to reveal that it had signed an agreement with Fashion TV for the distribution of three of the latter’s channels on Apstar 7. It also said it was providing services for other channels on the satellite.
The significance of this is that it marks a major expansion of the Austrian telco’s business activities beyond Europe. Apstar 7, which is operated by China’s APT Satellite Holdings, offers extensive coverage of Asia, the Middle East, Africa and even parts of Australia.
Meanwhile, from Discovery we learnt the importance the company now attaches to Eurosport Player. This has been accompanied by a shift of emphasis, with the consumer experience now very much at centre stage.
Bulgaria’s Vivacom, on the other hand, discussed its expansion plans, which include the launching of new MCPC platforms with Eutelsat for Europe and Africa.
The conference sessions covered a wide range of topics including OTT, FTA broadcasting, eSports and indeed Big Data. There was general agreement among the panelists in the OTT session that there is currently little if no regulation of services such as Netflix. What is needed is a level playing field for local telcos, such as Telekom Austria and Hrvatski Telekom in Croatia, and OTT platforms.
On the other hand, one of the suggestions to emerge from the FTA broadcaster session was that they should aggregate their digital services in order to operate more effectively in the new OTT environment.
The Big Data session touched on a number of topics including privacy.
Some panelists saw Big Data as benign, while others voiced a few – albeit mild – concerns about its usage.