Quick Links

We speak to Natali Delic, director of the department for the development of residential customer services at Serbia's Telekom Srbija, which has just deployed a new over-the-top (OTT) video platform that will enable the delivery of mobile TV and OTT TV services in the future.

In this interview, Natali discusses the delivery of a multi-platform TV services and the challenge of obtaining content rights for delivery to mobile devices, as well as their eventual revenue potential.

What are the main challenges you have encountered when launching multi-platform TV services?

We have entered the global market through our Web TV offer for expatriates, which is an innovative approach for an incumbent operator. This certainly has many challenges, both in terms of getting copyright for live TV and video-on-demand content, as well as in developing and implementing an appropriate marketing strategy for reaching end-users that are scattered all over the world.

An important part of our strategy is mobile devices, but right now one of the big obstacles is that many content owners do not have clear a policy on content for tablets, and it is very hard to get content rights for mobile devices.

That puts us in the situation whereby we cannot offer the same end-user experience for mobile and Web TV because our offer for Web TV has more live TV channels than we can obtain for mobile TV, thus postponing the full implementation of a multiscreen solution.
 
What results have you found so far with the project?

The demand for our Web TV service in Serbia has been greater than expected, and one of the most important drivers is exclusive sport content that we can offer, thanks to the fact that we are a major shareholder in one of the TV companies in Serbia, Arena sport (which we acquired in the summer of 2011).
 
What benefits has a multi-platform TV approach delivered, beyond greater user engagement?

We expect that multi-platform TV will become one of the most important revenue generators for Telekom Srbija in the next couple of years.

Since this service is operating on the Internet, this provides the chance for nearly four million Serbian expatriates scattered all over the world to stay in touch with their culture and their language, by watching special TV programmes tailored to their needs.
 
How do you plan to expand and improve the service further?
 
There are two directions for expansion and improvement that we follow in parallel. One is in the area of content, where we plan to keep on offering exclusive content both for the whole world as well as for certain geographic regions.

The other is technology improvement, where we will integrate a number of value-added services around the content, thus offering interactivity to our users.

Search