Telecom Italia subsidiary in Germany Hansenet, which offers IPTV under the Alice brand, has bundled a €30 ($44) triple play offering, hiding even the tiny €10 price it used to charge for the 70 channel service. This puts pricing pressure on other Germany IPTV operators, namely Vodafone’s Arcor which only came into the market this January, undercutting both Alice and Deutsche Telekom’s hugely expensive service.
The Arcor deal came in TV bundles from 22 to 50 channels with prices of just €9.95 and €12.95, and triple play pricing starting at €39.95 for VoIP, broadband at 16 Mbps and 50 TV channels, plus VoD movies at €1.49 a movie and an initial selection of 500 movies.
In March Deutsche Telekom was forced to lower its price from the stupidly high €65 for the basic IPTV package down to €49.95 a month and as a result in May it announced that it was finally making some inroads into the German market. Installations jumped to 200,000 IPTV customers in the first quarter up from 116,000 at the end of last year, due to the price change.
In France Free has had to copy its name with its IPTV services and offer them for free, bundled with the price of a broadband line, at around the same €30 pricing, in order to gain any traction against France Telecom’s service.
Telecom Italia at the beginning of August, cited problems in both Brazil and Germany, with a brand new management team being put in place in Germany.
The Alice service was recently put up for sale in France and there are rumblings that the same thing may have to happen in Germany. Broadband lines have increased by 25% in the European Broadband Group at Telecom Italia, which takes in the German and Netherlands operations of which 10% is organic growth. Telecom Italia has 2.5 million customers in this group.
By comparison Telecom Italia in Italy has had more success and now has 180,000 IPTV customers there.
In a similar move this week Telefonica’s has cut prices on its IPTV platform in Spain, offering the basic TV channels for just €3 extra per month which means it has a triple play for €43.90 a month. Telefonica has 576,000 subscribers to its IPTV service, but is being hounded by Orange in its own backyard which has doubled IPTV subscriptions to 92,000 during the past year in Spain.