Broadcasters

Pay TV Broadcasters: Strategies for Time to Market

HDTV offers an opportunity to differentiate over competitors. This is particularly true for satellite TV platforms, due to the easy access to large bandwidths.

Pay TV broadcasters have insisted on the quality of digital signals as a marketing argument. It would appear difficult to let free-to-air broadcasters go to HD first.

Following consolidation, a few strong pay TV providers will emerge with a critical size of more than 3.5 million subscribers. Those pay TV broadcasters may try to leverage on the Average Revenue per Subscriber (ARPU) with premium HD offers.

Providing the highest quality of service, with diversity in programming, is instrumental in reducing churn.  Providing HD services, especially as first mover, will help to attract and keep HD enabled TV households.

Free to air Broadcasters: Strategies for Time to Market

HDTV offers an opportunity to differentiate over competitors through a technical breakthrough, which has not been possible since introduction of colour TV. A gap may appear between « high » and « low » quality channels.

HDTV creates a risk of loss of audience share in case of a launch of HD services by pay TV operators only. Most of the content available currently belonging to US broadcasters, thematic channels owned by European channels may suffer as well.

The rollout of Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT), which requires a set-top-box, offers the opportunity to bundle digital and HD reception in a common receiver. Introducing HD rapidly will allow treducing the equipment costs for future digital and HD viewers.

Global events, primarily the soccer World Cup in Germany and the Olympic Games in China, will offer in 2006 and 2008 a leverage for consumer awareness.