3 Italia is upping the stakes in its bid for dominance of the Italian mobile TV market, initiating a new set of bundles, and a €30 million advertising campaign revolving around the thousandth episode of an Italian soap opera, which it will now air for free.
The deals on offer still include its €49 per month unlimited Walk TV, but now this also includes an hour a day of voice calls, cheap video calling, and web surfing. It has added a new web browser, though it doesn’t say who supplied this, so that normal web sites can be viewed from a video handset for the price of €9 a month if this is not taken as part of a bundle.
It has also launched a new TV bundle called TuaTV which allows for all the Walk TV channels plus RAI2, RAI3, SKY Vivo, Boing and All Music channels.
The advertising campaign will also focus on the fact that 3 Italia will be re-broadcasting the 64 soccer matches that made up the last World Cup and remind everyone that it has the rights to the Serie A Italian football championship. The company is also offering what’s left of May and June for free and will only begin charging in July.
3 Italia was the first DVB-H service to go live in Europe during the 2006 World Cup, and managed to grab 300,000 new TV customers before its customer acquisition numbers began to dwindle, as both Telecom Italia and Vodafone Italy also launched DVB-H services in Italy. Its last official subscribers numbers said that 3 Italia has now broken the 400,000 number and is accelerating once again towards what was supposed to be its Christmas target of 500,000 mobile TV customers.
3 Italia also said this week that it was consulting with Maxis Communications in Malaysia and Astro, a TV channel owner there, and has extended the Malaysia DVB-H trial for another three months. The initial trial there was ended in February.
However this trial is being set-up by 3 Power, a 3 Italia Business Unit, which will provide DVB-H equipment, network design & planning, handsets, special SIM cards, Conditional Access and Digital Right Management, ESG, integration with CRM and billing in cooperation with its existing technology partners.
The trial will go live in mid 2007 in Kuala Lumpur and customers will be testing 6 TV channels from Astro on a Samsung handset.