Telecom Italia has overnight changed its formula for success in the Italian IPTV market, adding Mediaset content, including the all-important Serie A soccer games ‘ Italian premium soccer ‘ which drive most pay TV services globally.
So far it is only the highlights – Mediaset has to keep the good stuff to itself ‘ but it also includes film, TV serials and cartoons ‘ more or less all the content that has driven the uptake of 3 Italia’s mobile TV service in that country. It even includes the Italian version of Big Brother.
The IPTV service will also offer a brand new catch up service called ‘Mediaset last seven days’ which does what the name suggests and offers these same programs on VoD.
Telecom Italia will have live coverage of all Serie A matches played by Milan, Inter, Roma, Juventus, Napoli and Lazio around half of the teams, and the more popular half at that.
Telecom Italia will put all this on its Alice Home TV IPTV system immediately and will offer each of its packages at around half price for 6 months for customers signing up by April, and will offer free activation as well.
Mediaset is a rival to the publicly owned RAI TV broadcaster and is owned and run by the family of the Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and has a finger in every content pie in Italy.
Alice Home TV now has 200 TV channels and the service is available in 500 cities across Italy. It competes directly with Fastweb, once of the first IPTV services launched in Europe, still held up as one of the most innovative Telcos in IPTV, despite being acquired in 2007 year by Swisscom.
This week Swisscom reported its results for 2008 and said that the reason that its revenues were up 10.0% and its operating income up 6.4% was largely due to Fastweb. In Switzerland it grew mobile and broadband revenues as voice dropped and it also doubled its IPTV customers to 118,000, but this is still a disappointing figure. Fastweb customers grew 220,000 to 1.48 million, a rise of 17.4% and the company forecast a continued decline in Swiss business and a growth at Fastweb in Italy.