The FINANCIAL — SES, one of the world-leading satellite operators with a fleet of 55 geostationary satellites, has started negotiations with leading TV channels in Georgia.
The FINANCIAL — SES, one of the world-leading satellite operators with a fleet of 55 geostationary satellites, has started negotiations with leading TV channels in Georgia. It’s expected that Georgian channels will broadcast via SES satellite instead of Türksat 3A satellite. “MagtiCom is the first partner in Georgia that we started up with. Since building the uplink station for Magtisat we have become interesting to other broadcasters in Georgia as well,” Håkan Sjödin, SES’s Vice President (Sales) for Scandinavia, the Baltics and Eastern Europe, told The FINANCIAL.
SES provides satellite communications services to broadcasters, content and internet service providers, mobile and fixed network operators and business and governmental organizations worldwide. In Georgia its only partner is MagtiCom so far. MagtiCom is presented through five brands on the country’s communications market, and provides mobile and fixed telephony, internet and satellite television services to over 3 million subscribers.
“We welcome all the broadcasters, all the TV channels in Georgia to join our platform. Negotiations have already been started with some of them. There are several companies who want to negotiate with us. In a few months’ time we will be able to announce about our cooperation. We will always be MagtiCom’s partners, forever,” he added.
SES and MagtiCom are working together on MagtiSat, which is the first direct-to-home satellite broadcasting in Georgia. MagtiSat is broadcast by ASTRA’s 1G satellite (31.5 degrees East), owned and operated by SES. MagtiSat is two years old already and serves more than 100,000 subscribers.
“In just a short period of time the Georgian market has exploded and this will continue because everybody is hungry for good quality TV. The amount of time spent watching TV is not decreasing. It is actually increasing. The hours spent using a mobile or tablet per day are increasing greatly but its not decreasing a TV part, TV part is growing, this is a general trend. If we look at the development which we see here the Georgian people follow the international standards and innovations of the satellite industry very fast. Georgia started late, but if we look at the growth of MagtiSat in two years’ time, we are already reaching 10 percent of TV households in the country. That is very fast development compared to other countries. The international standards are regulated on a worldwide basis and everybody has to follow them. Georgia follows them perfectly fine” Sjödin said.
To mark the second year of its successful operations, MagtiSat has launched three new in-house cinema channels – Magti Hit, Magti Kino and Chveni Magti. Magti Hit screens the most popular movie hits of the 21st century in Georgian and in HD. Magti Kino features the most popular and high-earning films of the past 20 years in Georgian. Chveni Magti broadcasts masterpieces of Georgian feature and documentary films.
MagtiSat currently offers to its subscribers more than 100 channels in standard definition (SD) and six in high definition (HD) within different programme packages.
“This year we are planning to launch ASTRA 5B, a new satellite which will extend SES’s transponder capacity and geographical reach across Eastern Europe and the South Caucasus. We hope that this launch will increase our successful co-operation with MagtiCom, and that together we will implement new, thriving projects which will reveal the benefits and potential of satellite broadcasting to all,” said Sjödin.
Two years on, the market has shown that demand for satellite TV broadcasting is significant in Georgia – not only in the regions, where other telecommunications networks are either difficult to deploy or not cost-effective, but also in the country’s capital, where digital terrestrial TV and IPTV solutions are present. “Different from the competitors, MagtiSat is able to be taken with you. Many people who live in Tbilisi also have a summer house and they can take the box with them, whereas with IP – they cannot. So it is quite convenient to use satellite and take it wherever you go,” he said.
Based upon global trends and strong demand for high-quality digital broadcasting in Georgia and in the region as a whole, MagtiCom and SES built an uplink station in late 2013. With an antenna radius of 6.3 metres and weighing in at over 6 tonnes, this satellite ground station is unique in Georgia in terms of power and operational output, and is one of the largest in the entire Caucasus region, according to MagtiCom.
“Because of there being no borders the satellite will transmit to everyone in the whole region regardless if it is one country, three or five. In that case satellite is very good. When it comes to Georgia, there is a mixture of satellite, terrestrial, that will transform in the digital in the near future and Internet Protocol Television (IPTV), That is a normal mix that you can see in the world today,” he said.
As Sjödin proves, using satellite is extremely cheap compared to an IPTV network. “If you send one to one like you do in an IPTV network, it costs every time you send to a new person. When it comes to satellite, you send it once and everybody can receive it. So it is extremely cost-efficient. The more people watching the cheaper it is for use per person. If you want to reach everybody in Georgia, four million people at the same time with satellite, that is extremely cheap compared to anything else. If you have digital transfer networks it is more costly, satellite is very cheap in that sense,” he said.
Q. As Georgia is preparing to become a part of the EU’s family, it has to implement different requirements in different fields. What about in terms of the satellite industry? What are the main requirements that Georgia needs to implement?
A. The biggest issue for everyone in this industry is content rights. They stream new movies from the internet in a pirate way. I think that is the biggest problem in Georgia. Internet service providers need to stop doing such things. Otherwise if some companies pay a lot for the rights of a movie and then somebody pirate decides to stream them over the internet free of charge, this hampers the market.
Q. What are the challenges in the process of switchover to digital broadcasting in Georgia and how would you estimate the digitalization process here?
A. This is a political decision. The politicians have to decide who will take care of the digital network – will it be state-owned or private one. It should choose one model, you need to have a common platform. Then you need to decide how many people in Georgia will have access to terrestrial network. A privately owned company will probably be oriented on Tbilisi where half of the population live, because that is very cheap and you can make a lot of money. No one would like to do it in a country where few people live. With satellite you already have digital TV, so basically you do not need the digitalization process. Again, 10 percent of households already have MagtiSat which is digital TV and Silknet is digital TV as well.
Q. What are the new trends and innovations in the satellite industry?
A. I think what is going to happen is that IP and TV are coming together. In the future we will see set-top boxes that are able to receive signals from an IP network as well as from a satellite. These two techniques will be merged. That means that you can also use TV to search the internet. It already exists and will come to Georgia soon.
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