True Visions to concentrate on growing pay-TV business

While many broadcasters are eager to jump into the digital-TV business under the planned licensing of the National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission (NBTC), Suphachai said that at the moment True’s pay-TV flagship – True Visions – wants to continue concentrating on its existing businesses and expanding its pay-TV local content.
Suphachai said that True Visions expects total advertising revenue this year of about Bt1.5 billion, up from the expected Bt1 billion last year. The average advertising revenue is Bt9,000 per minute and the highest is Bt35,000 per minute. True Visions had about 1.68 million subscribers as of the third quarter of last year.
He said that with the NBTC at helm of the industry, he believes True Visions TV programme copyright would be better protected.
He said True Visions is ready to bid for the three-year rights to broadcast the English Premier League football and believes that the competition will be fierce.
True Visions’ existing three-year broadcasting rights for the Premier League will expire next year and a new round of bidding for broadcasting rights will take place in the middle of this year. True Visions reportedly paid Bt3 billion to win its existing Premier League broadcasting rights.
GMM Grammy has already acquired the multimedia distribution rights for the German Bundesliga football league in Thailand, Laos and Cambodia from DFL Sports Enterprises in a three-year deal, covering the 2012-2015 seasons.
RS this year won the three-year broadcasting rights for La Liga, Spain’s top football league.
True group’s businesses range from cellular service to pay TV and broadband Internet services.
Suphachai added that the group’s highlight this year would still be TrueMove H brand 3G-850MHz cellular broadband service provided by True subsidiary Real Move. The service is targeting 4 million customers this year, up from about 800,000 at present.
Real Move has purchased 3G-bandwidth capacity from CAT Telecom to provide the service.
Recently True filed a complaint at the Central Administrative Court that the NBTC had abused its power by ordering CAT and Real Move to jointly amend part of their wholesale-resale contract regarding the 3G service in order to make the deal comply with its anti-monopoly regulations.
True and CAT signed many deals on January 27, 2011 to pave the way for their collaboration in the 3G-850MHz-service offering. The deals are being scrutinised by state authorities from the NBTC to the Information and Communications Technology Ministry if they were made in compliance with relevant laws and regulations.
In a separate matter, Suphachai said that True was waiting to see the ICT Ministry’s policy on cellular concessions whose terms were nearing their end.
The concession term of True’s cellular flagship, TrueMove, will end late next year. TrueMove has proposed to its concession owner CAT that it wants to buy its conventional cellular network from CAT at a proposed value of Bt10 billion as part of its plan to deal with the approaching end of its concession.
Once the concessions end, the private cellular operators that hold the state concessions have to transfer their network assets to their state concession owners under the Build-Transfer-Operate arrangement.
TrueMove is also waiting for the NBTC to make it clear how to deal with the approaching end of its concession.