Turk Telekom Group has found it considerably easier to expand a Web TV service than a fully managed IPTV offering, and the company is making direct additional revenues from it. The ‘Tivibu Web’ service now has 1.2 million customers subscribing, dwarfing the 30,000 customers for the ‘Tivibu Home’ IPTV offer. The IPTV service is limited by the pace of network transformation, Baris Polat, Service Design Manager at Turk Telekom, explained at the OTT TV World Summit last week. “IPTV is only in the cities and things move slowly,†he said.
The telecoms group is fully committed to both services and the online offer certainly demonstrates that there is an appetite in the country for video services that it aggregates. It also means it can gain attention in a Pay TV market dominated by satellite. Turk Telekom could even make the service available overseas, targeting the considerable Turkish expat populations in places like Germany (especially), London and also the U.S. Tivibu Web is also the basis for a push into multi-screen video that will encompass connected TVs and games consoles as well as tablets and smartphones.
The Tivibu services are made available by TTNET, the Internet Service Provider subsidiary within Turk Telekom Group. The company is harnessing a distributed CDN architecture to ensure the quality of the online services. According to Polat, the big driver for traffic is catch-up TV, with peak viewing between 6-12pm. He says that while the company is competing against satellite and cable with the IPTV offer, the competition to Tivibu Web is peer-to-peer and illegal websites. “The beauty of Tivibu is that you can get everything you need within a single package,†he says.
Polat believes the Tivibu service provides a number of new revenue opportunities beyond the discrete subscriptions. One is encouraging people to break through their broadband quotas by consuming video, forcing them towards higher tier broadband. Another is targeted advertising. “We started with simple advertising but we are about to launch targeted advertising so if you want to deliver advertisements to people that live in London only, you can,†he told the audience gathered in that city. Increased VOD sales are another route to new money and Polat has high hopes for recommendations, with the company set to introduce a recommendations engine.
The monetization of online operator services was also addressed by Irina Ariana Cazacu, Product Development Manager at Romtelecom, the Romanian telco. Her company launched its Dolce TV online offer in March this year, a service that now offers 30 free-to-to air linear TV channels and a library of over 200 movies (including free and paid). Cazacu told the conference that while it is important to give customers what they want, you need to monetize online services too.
She says the possible revenues streams are: more subscription revenue when looking at the television service as a whole, increased broadband subscriptions, and new content transactions like VOD. She also highlighted the importance of getting to know customers better in this interactive environment.
“You can have recommendations based on customer profiles and preferences but also based on what works for you as an operator in terms of rights windows and what you paid for the content, and what you would like to push more,†she said. Cazacu also highlighted apps and games as a way to make money from online and multi-screen generally.
