SinemaTV – #Digital TV Enthusiast#

2015 on turkishtvmarket.info

It’s been almost 2 year since turkishtvmarket.info has been launched. A variety of people from all over the world subscribed to my newsletter. It’s really great to have such an interest on this particular area.

Herebelow you will find the most popular posts of 2015 in chronological order. This is a kind of rituel of me. This post is the 2015 version of my earlier post at the end 2014.

Stay tuned in 2016 for getting a global picture of Turkish TV Market 🙂

The global overview of Turkish Pay-TV Market as of Q4 2014

Turkish Regulatory Body in Telecommunications Industry (BTK) has just announced the market figures for Q4 of 2014. You can download the complete report here. Let me make a quick summary of the figures of TV space.

Number of TTNet IPTV (Tivibu) service has become 289.496 as of Q4 2014. The same number was 286K one year ago as of Q4 2013. There is clearly a slow down there. The increase in number of subs has stopped during past year. Perhaps it’s because of the high churn rate.
The number of customers in Turkcell Superonline IPTV (Turkcell TV+) service was 15.270 in Q3 2014. As of Q4 2014, it has reached 60.000. There is big growth here. A customer gain of 45K in just one quarter is clearly a big big step forward.
The number of Turksat Kablo TV customers is around the same level since long tiem. It’s a total of 1.176.126 as of 2014, quite steady since a few quarters. The table below is self-explanatory. A government officer tolda that Turksat is one of the state-owned companies which is planned to be privatized within this year. This could be one of the reasons why there is not much happening in Turksat. Nevertheless, the installed base over 1 million is quite interesting. I’m pretty sure that there will be plenty of companies who will get interested in Turksat acquisition.

Number of subs of Digiturk as of Q4 2014 is 2.942.643. The greatest player of the market is still significantly ahead of the market.
D-Smart had a customer base of 1.048.960 in the same timeframe. D-Smart is apparently losing momentum. It has lost major sports content to Tivibu lately.
The youngest player of the industry Filbox has just 3125 customers after 2 quarters of the launch. The value prop is selling a CAM module and paying 1 year subscription fee in advance and having access to about 20 premium Live TV channels such as SinemaTV, Da Vinci Learning, English Club TV etc.

If one looks to the global picture, the total number of subs in Turkey is around 5,5 mio as of end of 2014. Considering the number of total households is 18 million, the Pay-TV penetration rate is a bit higher than 30%. As a matter of fact, there is no much progress regarding the penetration rate over the past few years. Actually this is not much surprising because except Turkcell TV+, none of the player could manage to make significant growth over the past years. This rate is still not good enough compared to the European countries. I deeply believe that there is a huge potential for growth in Turkish pay-TV market. The key thing is to formulate the right pricing, value prop and content offering. That’s the challenge the management teams should overcome. Once this has been succeed, the level of 40% penetration is realistically achievable in a few years ahead.

Last but not least, the updated market share of the Pay-TV players is as follows;

Broadcasting Rights of Turkish Basketball League

Turkey Basketball League games will be broadcasted by Digiturk and free-to-air sports channel NTV Spor for 3 years starting from 2015-2016 season.

To recap: The split of sports content digital rights in Turkey is as follows:

Digiturk: Turkish Premier Football League, English Premier Football League, Turkish Airlines Basketball Euroleague, Turkey Beko Basketbol League, Russian League, Brazilian League, Wimbledon and ATP1000 Masters Tennis
D-Smart: Spanish Premier Football League (La Liga), NBA TV, Formula 1, Motor GP
Tivibu: UEFA Champions League, UEFA Europe League, France Ligue, Italy Seria A
Teledunya (Kablo TV): No exclusive content
Turkcell TV+: No exclusive content

Digiturk was already the official broadcaster since past 6 years. With this new announecement it will continue for another 3 years.

It’s been made public that the contract fee is 12 million Euro / per year. While Digiturk will be broadcasting 2 games per week, the other shareholder NTV Spor will deliver another 2 games every week. Considering the enormous fee paid (321 Million UDS + VAT) for Turkish Premier Football League by Digiturk, 12 million Euro sounds pretty cost effective. Although Digiturk managed to reduce the total cost around by half, it had no more the exclusive rights which might cause customer churn in return.

TTNet announced new movie channels line named as Sinetivi

TTNet’s TV service Tivibu has just launch brand-new movie channels line named as Sinetivi. The new channels are:

Sinetivi, Sinetivi 2,
Sinetivi Adrenalin, Sinetivi Adrenalin 2,
Sinetivi Karnaval, Sinetivi Karnaval 2

Hence, Tivibu with 24 movie channels has become the TV service with most movie channels. TTNet announced that there will be a total of 2500 movies available to their customers in 2015 of which 1000 will be available in Sinetivi channels.

TTNet’s Marketing VP N.Mert Basar and Content Director Volkan Üst organised a meeting past week where they shared details about new announcement.

So far, TTNet had acquired around 5000 movies from local producers like BKM, TAFF, Camasirhane, Fida, Avsar, TCM , Boyut Film as well as worldwide studios like 20th Century Fox, Walt Disney, Warner Bros, Paramount, MGM, NBC Universal.

Sinetivi channels will be on-air 7/24 with both original and Turkish audio language coupled with Turkish subtitle option.

Turkey is welcoming the new Pay-TV operator..

It’s been estimated that there are more than 10 mio Pay-TV subscribers out of 18 mio households in Turkey. The major player of the market are:

Digiturk
D-Smart
Kablo TV/Teledunya
Tivibu
Turkcell TV+

In addition to these, a new player has just arrived : Filbox.

Filbox joined the competition with a different business model. Oflaz group, best known with SinemaTV movie channels is the sole shareholder of Filbox platform. Filbox provides TV service without a need to STB investment or installation operation. This has been accomplished thanks to CAM module technology.

The greatest cost item of global Pay-TV operators is STB cost. Following STB cost comes installation related costs. Oflaz tried to differentiate her service in this respect. Filbox customers will be still able to use their equipments (DVB-S2 and CI, CI+ supporting TV sets and satellite receivers) to receive Filbox channels which have been broadcasted in encrypted format in Turksat 4A satellite. All they need is Filbox CAM module to decrypt Filbox Live channels. Hence, Filbox could avoid STB and installation related costs.

Filbox content offer includes SinemaTV, SinemaTV 2, SinemaTV Aile, SinemaTV 1001, SinemaTV Aşk, SinemaTV Aksiyon movie channels, German entertainment channel RTL, documentary channel Sci Tech TV, English learning channel English Club TV, kids documentary channel Da Vinci Learning, nature documentary channel Viasat History and Viasat Nature and fight channel Fight Box. As a matter of fact, you can surely continue to get hundreds of FTA channels in Turksat with your existing setup.

The retail price for Filbox CAM module is 149 TRY (~52 EUR, 66 $). Once one gets the module and done with the activation, Filbox channels are available for 1 year.

Filbox module can be found at Filbox authorized shops and major e-commerce platforms Hızlıal.com and Hepsidijital.com.

Turkish Pay-TV Market 2014 Report is ready!

Turkey 2014 Pay-TV Market Report is ready now.

This is by far the most comprehensive and in-depth report on Turkish Pay-TV market.

If you would like to get an electronic copy of this unique report please drop an email to info@turkishtvmarket.info for further discussion!

You can see `table of contents` and `executive summary` sections of the report here.

Alternative ISP Millenicom launched new TV service: DopingBox

Millenicom is one of the alternative internet service providers in Turkey. It provides broadband and voice services with brand name Doping to both residential and corporate customers. It has more than 120K subs. You can get further info about Millenicom here.

Last week Millenicom organized a press conference and launched its brand-new TV service DopingBox.

DopingBox is an Android-based STB. There are various Android based boxes around sold out in retail shops and e-commerce platforms. But this is the first time that an operator is offering Android box. A brave move!

Thanks to the wide variety of apps on Google Play, you can download many multimedia, social and game applications and enjoy on big TV screen. Spotify, youtube, angry birds, twitter, facebook to name a few. Apparently, this is the inherent nicety of Android boxes.

One of the interesting points of the box is wifi connectivity. This will make the installation process clearly much easier. Again, this is the first time that an operator is offering wifi as a standard feature. One of the most challenging aspect of Android boxes is the interaction between end user and applications normally designed for touch screen. DopingBox is trying to overcome this issue with an airmouse remote control.

DopingBox will have VOD content enriched by film&series content providers SinemaTV and Filmbox and TVYO(Dogus Media Group’s OTT service) and its own library. Live TV channels are missing and this is clearly the weakest point of DopingBox.

A few words on the commercial part:

DopingBox is the result of 2,5 million TRY investment and 2,5 years of efforts.
The target is to reach 3o percent of Doping customers at the end of 1 year.
If you are a Doping customer already, you need to pay 19.99 TRY per month (9.99 TRY first 3 months) This includes the service fee and device rental fee.
If you’ll become a new Doping customer, there is a bundle offer (TV+internet) In this case, you’ll get a discounted price for internet and you need to also pay

We see lots of telcos offering TV service on-top of broadband and voice services. Turkey is not an exception. Actually, due to the changing market dynamics offering a TV service is no more an option, it’s a must. The most concrete advantage of this is lower churn and higher stickness. This fact is deserving another post.

References:

turk-internet

millenicom

dopingbox

BTK’s Decision on SinemaTV and D-Smart

D-Smart, Turkish satellite operator has decided to end broadcasting SinemaTV channels by the end of 2013. BTK, Information and Communication Technologies Authority in Turkey has now made a final decision about customers who have contracts with D-Smart.

The subscribers who have contract with D-Smart, are now free to cancel their subscriptions without paying any extra contract fee.
D-Smart is obliged to publish this information for 1 month via its web site.

SinemaTV, owned by Oflaz Media Group has started its broadcasting life with D-Smart. SinemaTV is now available on other broadcast networks and IPTV networks in Turkey as well. SinemaTV now offers 6 channels: Sinema TV, Sinema TV 2, Sinema TV Aile, Sinema TV 1001, Sinema TV Aşk ve Sinema TV Aksiyon. SinemaTV claims that there are 430.000 D-Smart subscribers with SinemaTV packages.

This article is first published @ tivilogy.com by Tanil Ergin.