also helping,” he advised. PACK. The major satellite broadcasters each continue to offer hundreds of channels to tempt viewers, but again it is the‘ usual suspects’ which dominate. In the pay-TV arena, OSN is making some dramatic changes to pricing and the channels on offer. New services have come on air targeting kids, sports fans, South Asians and Filipinos. A tenchannel Ultimate Sports Pack now includes three new channels – OSN Sports Action 1 HD, OSN Sports Action 2 HD and OSN Sports 5 HD – featuring new programming and localised Arabic content.
OSN is also overhauling its pricing structure, and with some commentators talking about“ prices being slashed”. In truth, the creation of‘ OSN-lite’ bundles only reflects what almost every other pay- TV operator is doing. Prices for OSN packs will now start at AED / SAR79(€ 20) for 32 channels, with customers able to customise packs with a selection of sports, movies and entertainment channels, according to budget. The announcement comes after last year’ s OSN senior management changes, which saw the appointment of Martin Stewart, former DG of Spanish cable operator ONO( and at one stage a senior staffer at BSkyB), as OSN’ s CEO. TRENDS. Constantinos Papavassilopoulos, a senior analyst for IHS Markit, in a research note, says he believes the new pricing and customised package offers are long-overdue and a direct response to some worrying trends in subscriber churn numbers and not helped since late 2015 when OSN’ s archrival beIN Media added entertainment to its already hugely strong premium sports content.“ OSN has been losing customers since 2015, and a new team has been hired to rescue the operator. OSN’ s churn levels have almost doubled since 2014 from around 16 per cent to 30 per cent in 2016,” he advised.
“ For instance, in Egypt and Jordan, the OSN introductory package is now between 19 and 48 per cent less expensive than the beIN Media equivalent. Even OSN’ s medium-tier packages have very similar prices to beIN Media ones – for instance in Morocco and Algeria, OSN medium-tier packs are only 5-10 per cent more expensive than beIN Media’ s. Only OSN’ s premium packs remain considerably more expensive,” he noted.
Time will tell how these changes affect subscription numbers – and churn, and whether the new South Asian and Filipino
“ We are looking at LEO and MEO, and very seriously.”- Khalid Balkheyour, Arabsat bundles make a meaningful difference to viewing numbers. PORTTFOLIO. There are other green shoots of new developments, and one area is YahLive’ s fast-expanding portfolio of Farsi channels. CEO Sami Boustany at YahLive says that its 52.5 degrees slot is working extremely well in gathering new viewers, and now tops 300 channels.“ We have now reached a critical mass, and we will shortly be releasing fresh research data which shows that we are now firmly placed as the Number 1 Farsi-language operator. Last year we wanted to try and do much the same, and bring together on one satellite all the channels going to the Maghreb. I can confirm that we now carry more than 80 channels having added 50 channels in January 2017, mostly private channels and mainly targeting Algeria,” he added.
Boustany admits that his satellite( owned in a JV between YahSat and SES) is late coming to the North African region:“ But we have one clear advantage over our competitors, which is to be pragmatic. We know that viewership was widely distributed via several of our competitor operators, not least Eutelsat, Arabsat, and the others. What we have managed to do is to create a simple‘ hot spot’ for the region, as we did with Farsi speakers. We have even managed to bring in smaller OTT operators where the budgets are smaller and to convince them to be on satellite. Consequently, we now have a very nice selection of private channels, and we’ re working on bringing the public channels onto the platform and consolidated into one orbital position.” YahLive says that it will shortly embark on a major marketing and publicity campaign.“ We are ready to go with this when the time is right, but we wanted to be certain of having the correct number of channels. We think we will be at the right point during Q2, once we have a few more channels under our belt. Ideally, we are targeting more than 100 by the end of this year,” says Boustany. COUNT. As to how many channels YahLive was now carrying, Boustany admits it is a fast-moving number.“ Our channel count changes almost every week. In Farsi, we have more than 100 channels, and in total our East beam includes more than 300 channels. More than 200 are exclusive to us. However, it is also worth remembering that we also suffer a little churn, when channels drop out, but the core is very stable and the overall trend is up. But to be absolutely transparent, it is worth remembering that competition
EUROMEDIA 17