‘Pay-TV industry in Ukraine’: is the Ukrainian viewer ready to pay for TV

Panel discussion on pay-TV in Ukraine will take place on September 19 at KYIV MEDIA WEEK. Its participants will try to explore a new angle of view on pay-TV in Ukraine, focusing on whether there is demand for paid television in Ukraine and how this affects the development of the market.

Are Ukrainian viewers ready to pay for pay-TV? This question will be the starting point for a panel discussion, which will be attended by leading representatives of the pay-TV market, telecom and media industry of Ukraine. In search for an answer to it, the participants will discuss which part of the Ukrainian audience is willing to pay and why, how many these viewers are there in the country and how to identify them in the total mass of potential customers.

Also in the course of the discussion, moderated by Marketing Director of StarLightMedia Orest Biloskurskiy, the topic of innovations that the industry offers to stimulate the audience's interest will be touched upon. Furthermore, other industry matters of concern will be discussed by media market experts. 

Satellite and OTT: are they friends or foes? Would encryption discourage viewers or vice versa – attract the audience to watch high quality content? Does high quality content still need a provider?

According to the report of the second quarter of 2017 by the international research company Dataxis, last year the number of subscribers of pay-TV services around the world reached the level of 1.05 billion people (a milestone of 1 billion users was reached in late 2016). At the same time, the question remains open, what is more important for pay-TV – the number of subscribers or actual viewing. This will be also discussed in the course of the event. The participants will also discuss, are pay-TV and paid content synonyms.

One of the topics of discussion will be also the impact of streaming platforms on the market. They will talk about the HBO phenomenon and the questionable prospects of Netfilx in Ukraine. In January 2018, it was 2 years since the American platform Netflix was officially launched in Ukraine. And the number of its subscribers in our country can not be called impressive: at the end of 2017, according to various data, it was from 43,000 (research by Nakono) to 100,000 (IHS Markit data and Liga.net calculations).

Is there single worldwide pay-TV market, and whether Ukrainian content and Ukrainian channels will be part of it – that’s another strategic issue that the panel participants will discuss. And also they will talk about the priority of studying the audience preferences for the maximum success of pay-TV and OTT.

Panel discussion ‘Pay-TV industry in Ukraine’ will be held on the third day of KYIV MEDIA WEEK (September 19) from 11:20 to 13:00.

KYIV MEDIA WEEK will be held on September 17-21, 2018 in Hyatt Regency Kyiv (Kyiv, Ukraine). Register for the media forum here.

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