Telcos believe that they have big advantages in providing cable TV services. Therefore, they have jumped on the bandwagon.

Viettel and FPT, the two big guys in the telecom sector, believe that they have big advantages because they can provide different services on the same infrastructure system, and that they can quickly bring TV and Internet broadband Internet services to 20 million households.

According to the Information and Communication Strategy Institute under the Ministry of Information and Communication, 30-40 percent of households would be able to use pay-TV services by 2020. The institute has also forecast the growth rates of 25-30 percent of pay-TV services year on year in 2012-2015 and the growth rates of 10-15 percent in 2016-2020.

It is expected that by 2020, the total turnover from pay-TV services would reach 800 million-1 billion dollars. There are about nearly 20 million households now, promising a big and lucrative market for service providers which telecom groups will not miss.

Viettel, FPT and AVG have applied to the Ministry of Information and Communication for the licenses to provide cable TV services. Once the three big guys jump into the TV market, the pay-TV market would witness a boom.

Nguyen Manh Hung, Deputy General Director of Viettel, predicted that pay-TV would account for 70-80 percent in the coming years. Therefore, he thinks that the management agencies, when programming the development of TV services, should give priority to pay-TV services.

Of pay-TV services, cable TV would account for 70-80 percent, IPTV 10-15 percent, while the other 10 percent would be allocated for satellite TV, digital terrestrial TV. Now in Vietnam, TV is the entertainment industry which makes up one percent of GDP.

According to Viettel, if TV covers different sectors of education, healthcare and shopping, it would contribute not only one, but two or three percent to GDP. Vietnam strives to obtain 200 billion dollars in GDP by 2016-2017, which means that pay-TV should bring 4 billion dollars.

Hung has affirmed that telcos have great advantages to provide TV services, including cable, IPTV and digital terrestrial TV. To date, Viettel has had 200,000 kilometers of optical fibers throughout the country. This allows to reduce the investment costs on cable and IPTV and make TV services reachable to remote areas.

Hung has stressed that because of the advantages, the competent agencies need to facilitate telcos to join the TV market, because it is telcos which can solve the problem of popularizing TV and broadband Internet when they can provide services at the most reasonable fees.

Truong Dinh Anh, General Director of FPT, also said that FPT has advantages when it jumps into the market.

“FPT Telecom’s is to connect every household in Vietnam. To date, FPT Telecom has brought ADSL cable to 700,000 customers and we hope to connect more,” Anh said.

He went on to say that cable TV proves to be a convenient tool to provide high resolution TV services and to provide broadband Internet on the same cable. FPT Telecom cherishes an ambitious plan of obtaining a big market share – the thing it has successfully done with ADSL services.

Especially, Anh believes that cable TV would be a great opportunity for FPT. Consumers now demand increasingly high quality services. However, their requirements still have not been satisfied with small service providers in localities. Therefore, the appearance of big companies there, like Viettel or FPT, would create a competition among cable TV service providers, thus helping upgrade the service quality.

Source: Buu Dien/ VNN