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What you need to know: This weblog captures key data points about the global telecoms industry. I use it as an electronic notebook to support my work for Pringle Media.

Friday, June 11, 2010

Kick-starting Industry Growth - Tuning into the future of telecoms

Television is becoming increasingly fundamental to the future of the telecoms industry, according to senior executives gathered in London this week for an A.T. Kearney telecoms and media conference.

“TV is the element around which you bundle the rest and anchor the bundle,” said Michael Hecker, Chief Strategy Officer of multinational telecoms company MTS. “That is why Google is going into television. One of the biggest challenges is for [telecoms] operators not to lose the TV battle.” Bundling television and telecoms into one package will keep customers from switching to other telecoms providers, Hecker added, noting that the churn rate among MTS’s “a couple of million TV customers” is extremely low.

BT, the UK-based telecoms group, has also put television at the forefront of its strategy, Gavin Patterson, CEO of BT’s Retail division, told the conference. Although Patterson said that BT Vision, its on-demand television service, has so far only attracted half a million customers, the typical customer is accessing it forty times a month, rivalling the UK’s major free-to-air networks BBC1 and ITV1. Over time, BT intends to deliver high-definition and, eventually, 3D television-on-demand. To read more: click here

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