Rostelecom will pay more than $50 million Smartlabs company for IPTV

Rostelecom will pay more than $50 million Smartlabs company which will develop and will implement a single platform for the federal IPTV project (engl. Internet protocol television, digital television on the Internet) the operator. Now the share of IPTV among subscribers of a pay TV which market only for January-March of this year made 9.4 billion rubles does not exceed 3%, but at the same time grows for 5% in a quarter.

The contract is expected five years, its amount exceeds $50 million. The representative of Rostelecom Oleg Rumyantsev confirmed that the operator held the tender for the choice of the supplier which will provide the solution for creation of the IPTV system of federal scale. "Now in joint Rostelecom three different IPTV platforms which are totally servicing more than 400 thousand subscribers are used. For benefit of Smartlabs played also that its solutions were already used in MRK (interregional companies, subsidiary companies of Svyazinvest) on Far East and the Urals before consolidation with Rostelecom", - O. Rumyantsev explains.

The CEO of Smartlabs Grachev Mikhail confirmed that his company won the tender, having added that about ten companies took part in it. The top manager explains that as a core the platform of provision of services SmartTUBE which will connect among themselves modules of the Russian and foreign production will be used. Besides, it gives the chance to provide a broad set of interactive services (for example, "to video on demand", "the network videorecorder" and so forth) as on the wired network on the Internet, and on mobile devices.

At the end of 2010 revenues of joint Rostelecom from services of paid TV were 1 billion rubles (plus 77.9% by 2009 without the purchased "National telecommunications" (NTK). According to the strategy of the operator, this amount by 2015 should increase to 19.8 billion, and number of subscribers - from 5.5 million to 8.3 million.

By iKS-Consulting estimates, in the first quarter the number of subscribers of a pay TV made 21 million, at the same time on a segment of cable TV 67% of subscribers, 30% - were the share of satellite TV and 3% for IPTV, penetration of service of paid TV made 42%. But at the same time most the segment of IPTV in high gear grew - the number of users of this service increased by 5%, number of subscribers of satellite TV - for 2%, cable TV - for 1%. Market size in terms of money for this period is estimated at 9.4 billion rubles.

Satellite Tricolor TV from 5.5 million paid subscribers became the largest operator of the market. It is slightly less - 5.2 million subscribers - the base of Rostelecom was (including "National cable networks" (NKS, are under control of NTK), 2.5 million - at MTS (Comstar, Multiregion).