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Showtime-Orbit: what’s next?

Mansour ABU Neghimish

Two of the Middle East’s pay-TV platforms are now showing – more or less – a unified bouquet of premium channels. Bahrain-****d Orbit and Dubai-****d Showtime, who announced they would merge last week, are now offering viewers all of their com***ed premium bundles. Which leaves one other existing pay-TV operator, ART, and another DTH player waiting in the wings, each designed to further confuse viewers.

The advice from Showtime and Orbit to subscribers is to retune their set-top boxes. Orbit subscribers can now watch five Showtime channels, including movies, series, and entertainment channels. Subscribers of Showtime in turn now have access to Orbit’s movie channel, as well as America Plus and its comedy channels. Locally there had been complaints that some viewers could not receive the full packages

However, Showtime is facing a major challenge for the 2010 soccer season in that it has yet to sub-license the English Premiership. Showtime’s right to the games expire with this upcoming season (the rights go to Abu Dhabi Media) and there is – as yet – no certainty that viewers will get access to the games from August 2010. A study in a Gulf news site indicated that 50% of its UAE viewers would abandon Showtime if the soccer games were not carried.

Viewers who have access in the UAE to the DSL packages from E-Vision and Du could be forgiven for abandoning DTH and instead playing safe by choosing E-Vision or Du’s options. E-Vision, for example, offers a total of 15 premium bundles including all of Orbit and Showtime’s main channels.

But ART is already bigger than all of the above-****d companies com***ed, and while churn in the Middle East is notoriously high for all the DTH pay-TV operators, many are now awaiting the launch of yet another in the shape of Echostar. That company has been working hard these past few months to win support from the Gulf’s main free-to-air operators for their upcoming HDTV signals.

Orbit and Showtime Arabia have, since their 1994 and 1995 respective launches, lost their investors billions of dollars with barely a penny in profits. Orbit staff are saying there will be no job losses, as yet, but most observers expect this consolidation to lead to redundancies and all-important cost savings.

But with ART not having joined the party, and the new Echostar DTH-HDTV service waiting in the wings, the anxieties for Orbit and Showtime (and their ‘NewCo’ operation) are far from over
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