The TVN Group owns and operates 12 TV channels as well as the digital DTH platform N, and the company’s TVN offering is one of Poland’s major FTA channels. This breadth of operations makes TVN a major presence in the Polish broadcast landscape as well as one of the biggest broadcasters in Eastern Europe. In the three-months period that closed at the end of June, TVN Group generated revenues of 548 million Polish zloty ($191.5 million). Markus Tellenbach, CEO, of TVN, discusses the Polish broadcast market and how he hopes to grow the business.
VIA SATELLITE: What is the next phase of TVN’s growth strategy?
Tellenbach: If you look at the bigger picture, we will develop our revenue structure a little bit further away from being dominated by advertising. We want a more balanced situation where advertising should account for 50 percent of our overall revenues, and both transactional as well as carriage fees driven by pay-TV, as well as other services, will make up the other 50 percent. We believe this is a healthy target.
We have also launched pre-paid TV at the lower price point range of the market. That has been very successful with over 500,000 cards sold and more recently, we started to offer on the pre-paid side, a bundle of HD channels. You have a basic pre-paid package, and you can add on to that the pure HD pre-paid package with 10 HD channels. This is for a target group that does not want to have a broad choice that the post-paid platform offers but wants to have high quality on their selected content. The pre-paid service has been one of those elements that has enabled us to drive the pay-TV proposition in other segments of the markets.
We are a content house, so strengthening of the thematic channels will also be a key focus for us, so we will look to develop that still further. We are the dominant online media portal in Poland. O Net has fantastic growth rates. We see a structural shift from traditional display advertising into online. There are strong growth rates, so you will see strong developments related to advertising in the online area, which after many years has kicked in. This will fuel investment into the online offerings.
VIA SATELLITE: What is the split between advertising and other revenues today?
Tellenbach: In the first half of 2010, we generated 36.5 percent of revenues from non-advertising sources, compared with 32.8 percent in the full year 2009. So we are on track to get there and I am convinced that our revenues will be fully balanced in two to three years.
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