Major content sharing deal launched
Greece’s two biggest subscription TV providers will start sharing their sports content Friday, following an agreement they made last month.
“The agreement has no precedent in the Greek market, although we have examples of content exchange in the UK, Germany and Cyprus,” Panayotis Georgiopoulos, CEO of Nova Greece, told Kathimerini.
Georgiopoulos said that the exchange of sports programming “gives consumers the opportunity to watch their favorite championships on one platform, given the intensifying content fragmentation.”
One of the effects of fragmentation is content piracy, which, Georgiopoulos says, is especially high in Greece. Piracy also contributes to the relatively low penetration of subscription TV services: 31% of Greek households use this services, which places the country second to last among the 27 European Union members, where a total of 67% of households use subscription platforms.
The extent of the piracy threatens “the viability of Greek subscription TV and its significant investments in sports content,” Georgiopoulos says.
But, he adds, the packages now offered are cheap enough to draw away Greek consumers from piracy.
“A subscriber, paying just €21 [per month], combined with a Nova landline, can have legal access and enjoy 27 sports channels, with great championships and a total of 106 [channels] with access to more than 6,000 movie and TV series titles,” Georgiopoulos says.
“We believe that with this deal, we will mobilize the client positively to get a legal subscription,” he adds. He does believe that the deal with Cosmote TV will contribute to a radical decline of piracy.
Even more so, he says, the use of pirate services compromises private data and revenue from such services ends up financing the activities of criminal syndicates.
Still, Georgiopoulos, says, as bold as the deal between Cosmote TV and Nova is, it is not enough: “We need robust legislation to fight content piracy. It is time that the Ministry of Culture intervened to strengthen anti-piracy laws.
Besides piracy, another bane for subscription TV is high taxation. “The providers based abroad, such as Netflix, Disney and Amazon Prime, do not face the taxes we face. The paradox is that not only are Greek providers punished, but also the subscribers,” he notes.
