While British Telecom spent ten years and countless millions coming up with its BT Vision service, only for it to stagnate at around the 436,000 mark, having added a mere 18,000 in its last quarter, a similar French content offering has reached 324,000 subscribers on its first anniversary.
To be fair France Telecom and its main brand Orange, has been offering IPTV for a lot longer than BT and is talking about this offering on all three screens, the TV, the phone and a PC, but even so the Orange Cinema Series must still look like a huge success compared to its UK rival’s three year old service.
The Orange Cinema Series is a set of TV channels, offered both at multicast IPTV and VoD in three formats and resolutions. Most of the programming is either imported US TV series, or Hollywood Films or classic French Cinema. Orange said that 50% of subscribers use catch-up TV and they each watch 6.7 videos each month on average.
Orange Cinema Series includes cin’ max, for previously unreleased films and TV series; cin’ happy, a family channel; cin’ choc, for action movies; cin’ novo, for independent cinema and cin’ g’ants (giants), for classics.
Films include The Dark Knight, Quantum of solace, and the service carries the US True Blood series.
Now it has also reached terms with organizations representing French cinema professionals to carry their output over the coming year. The TV and PC version costs €12 a month and the mobile version costs €6.