It’s been a good week for OTT services in Central and Eastern Europe.
The most important development was undoubtedly the launch of HBO GO as a standalone service in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania.
Although HBO GO has been offered in the region by local distribution companies for several years – it made its debut in Hungary and Romania in the space of a week in June 2011 – this is the first time it has been made available directly to customers.
Undoubtedly, the standalone service will in due course be rolled out to more CEE markets, and indeed elsewhere on the continent. Up until this week, it had only been introduced in Spain and the Scandinavian countries.
Meanwhile, at the OTTtv World Summit, held in London, it was announced that the Hungarian national transmission company Antenna Hungária (AH) had just launched a new standalone OTT sports service named MindiGO Sport.
AH made its first foray into the OTT space only two months ago when it gave a debut to the non-standalone service MindiGO TV. It offers viewers the opportunity to watch the most popular channels on AH’s MinDig TV Extra on mobiles, tablets and PCs.
With MindiGO Sport, AH has gone one stage further by creating a product offering niche sports not shown by large broadcasters including AMC, Discovery and Hungary’s MTVA. It will be interesting to see how it fares in a market in which OTT is not as well developed as elsewhere in CEE.
Also at the OTTtv World Summit, we got an insight into Netflix’s strategy in the MENA region. In its classification, only a handful of markets – all in Western Europe – are regarded as ‘critical’, while in CEE an even smaller number, including Poland, make the next highest classification of ‘rising star’.
Unfortunately, the remaining ones are classed as either ‘opportunistic’ or ‘hold’, with the latter including most of the Balkans and all three Baltic Republics.
That is not to say Netflix dismisses these markets, but rather it prefers to focus on its strengths by concentrating on others.
Given such a strategy, one can argue that this may open up opportunities for other players, especially in the ‘hold’ parts of CEE.
