GMM Grammy has sky-high hopes for newly renamed unit

The subsidiary changed its name and logo after notification by Britain’s Sky Broadcasting Group that “1Sky” appeared to violate its trademark, said GMM Z chief executive officer Thana Thienachariya. Therefore the change was made to avoid any legal problems, and GMM Grammy has informed the UK company.
The cost of this rebranding to GMM Z is about Bt100 |million.
GMM Z provides satellite TV content, set-top boxes and home shopping services. Its main revenue comes from the sale of set-top boxes to receive free-to-air TV content and free satellite TV content and also GMM’s own content, and soon the main revenue driver will be its pay-TV content.
Thana said he saw good demand for the GMM Z set-top boxes. The company has raised its sales target of the boxes this year to about 2 million units, up from the previous target of 1.5 million. About 60,000 boxes were sold during the past two months.
Thana said GMM Z did not compete with anyone but its presence would help stimulate the market for satellite TV content.
Meanwhile, Paiboon denied that GMM Z’s business would be affected if it fails to acquire the broadcasting rights of the English Premier League (EPL) soccer matches from 2013 to 2016. He added that GMM Grammy had sufficient sports content. It also has spent about Bt1 billion to acquire foreign TV programmes.
Earlier, Paiboon disclosed that GMM Grammy was negotiating with other leading broadcasters to bid jointly for broadcasting rights to EPL matches from 2013 to 2016.
However, he declined to name those companies.
TrueVisions’ existing three-year broadcasting rights for the Premier League will expire next year, and a new round of bidding for them will take place in the middle of this year.
TrueVisions reportedly paid Bt3 billion to win the EPL broadcasting rights.