More local shows from pay-TV operators

Thailand’s limited pitch can accommodate just a few players. Market leader TrueVisions has proved for more than a decade that there are only 400,000-500,000 premium subscribers out of the 22.6 million households in the country.
However, newcomers like GMM Z, a subsidiary of GMM Grammy, and CTH, a group of 100 local cable TV operators, believe that there is more room for them to grow, particularly in the middle tier.
Nielsen (Thailand) predicts that pay-TV will grow about 27 per cent to Bt12.2 billion from Bt9.65 billion last year, driven by greater diversity in content, entrants, accessibility and packages.
In many developed markets such as the US and Europe, pay-TV penetration reaches 70-80 per cent, as they offer genuine premium and “killer content”.
“Though Thailand’s penetration of pay-TV remains low, about 10 per cent of all households, in five years it might reach 40-50 per cent. This is our current battlefield,” Fahmai Damrongchaitham, chief operating officer for platforms at GMM Z, told The Nation last week.
About 14.5 million households access free-to-air TV via satellite, so there is room to grow for pay TV in areas served by satellite. GMM Z wants to take a piece of this pie.
So does TrueVisions. It has entered into a strategic partnership with PSI Holdings, the country’s leading manufacturer and distributor of C-band satellite TV dishes, to expand into this mass subscriber segment. They launched “True TV by PSI” satellite set-top boxes and plan to introduce their HD box early next year.
It is hoped that those set-top box buyers will then subscribe and pay for mid-tier packages.
“Our company is so appreciative [of customers] it offers special TV programmes bundled with the box,” said Anat Mekpaiboonvatana, managing director of TrueVisions.
Besides strengthening their platform by rolling out satellite set-top boxes, another key strategy that pay-TV operators should focus on is owned and created premium contents.
GMM Grammy appears to have become a leading player recently.
“‘Hormone’, the series aired on the GMM One channel, is our first step in creating premium contents for pay-TV service in the near future,” Fahmai said.
Attaphon na Bangxang, chief programming officer of TrueVisions, said his company is creating Thai series based on popular Korean series such as “Coffee Prince” and “Autumn In My Heart”.
CTH may face more challenges than the other two major players as there are many things, such as accessibility and unique local content, to be done even though it secured “killing content” such as three seasons of the English Premier League football.