OTT offers mix of benefits to pay TV, says Toya’s Karbowski

Churn reduction, the desire to hold onto and attract top-tier subscribers and the possibility of making some additional revenues are some of the key goals behind the deployment of OTT services by Polish cable operator Toya, according to the company’s research and development director, Szymon Karbowski, speaking at Informa’s Digital TV CEE event in Prague today.

Karbowski said Toya’s main objectives in offering the service included reducing churn, for example by allowing people who moved out of area to continue to use Toya’s services. Karbowski said that, additionally, about 10% of the company’s pay TV customers generated 25% of revenues and Toya wanted to use the OTT service to keep these customers. He said there was also a limited opportunity to earn new revenue on OTT, although he added that OTT in Poland was driven primarily by advertising rather than transactional or subscription services. Most pay VOD online services have disappeared from the market, he said. Toya offers some pay services, such as a music on-demand option, including a Karaoke service, which Karbowski said was very successful, and an adult transactional VOD service.
One of the other main objectives of the service is that customers do not have to look to alternative devices to access multiple sources of content but can use Toya’s own set-tops for this.

Currently, some 75-80% of OTT users use the platform every day, said Karbowski.

Lodz-based Toya is Poland’s fourth largest cable operator with about 160,000 subscribers across the country. Karbowski said that Toya also has 13 active agreements with smaller network operator partners to sell Toya Digital over their networks.

The Toya OTT service uses content security technology from Conax, middleware from Cubiware and a back-end VOD platform from SeaChange.