M7 Group has brushed off an accusation that it is responsible for a high level of card sharing piracy in Slovakia, especially in the eastern part of the country.
Responding to a question from the audience from the recently launched DTH platform Pantelio at the Bratislava Business Briefing, Jaromir Glisnik, a member of the board at M7 Group, said that piracy has always been present in the country and been triggered by the availability of many Czech channels and increases in fees.
However, there is now also a new phenomenon in evidence. Whereas before it was just a case of people pirating because they wanted something cheap, now customers are saying “I don’t care how much it will cost, I need channels”.
Glisnik also insisted that the CA systems that its DTH platform Skylink uses are fully secure. Furthermore, he said there was a need for all market players to work together to tackle piracy and that this could not be left to Skylink alone.
Commenting on the same issue of piracy, Zdenko Rysavy, the CTO at Markiza Group, said that besides card sharing there was the problem of under reporting, with ISPs providing TV packages for free and then not reporting the figures to broadcasters.
Mojmor Mlcoch, the CFO at JOJ Group, added that his company supported the tendency to make the market more transparent. This was one of the benefits of fees.
