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Corporate Overview > Business Environment |
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| Business Environment |
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| Competitive Environment |
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We believe that the investment in infrastructure necessary to provide a high quality pay-television service is significant. Start-up costs include investments to secure transmission platforms, encryption technology, and decoder hardware to allow subscribers to receive the encrypted service and customer service and business support systems. In addition, the cost of obtaining premium programming is significant in its own right. Since payments under these contracts are generally made on a per subscriber basis, subject to minimum guarantees, programming costs can be prohibitive until an operator achieves a critical mass of subscribers which TrueVisions has already done.
Our continued investment in exclusive premium content, constant expansion of our platform, the offering of additional packages to allow us to access various economic segments of the market and strong sales and marketing drives will enable us to continue expanding our subscriber base and maintain our leadership position in the market. We also believe that over time the Thai Government will improve regulation, monitoring and enforcement of copyright usage which will allow legitimate operators as ourselves to continue to grow and allow a healthy and fair competitive environment for pay TV in Thailand. |
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| Indirect Competition |
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| We view ourselves as a provider of entertainment services. We therefore face competition from many entertainment alternatives such as cinemas, video, music and other options. In addition, we compete indirectly with the national free-to-air television stations in Thailand. We believe that our unique programming, including popular first-run movies, knowledge content and sporting events, gives us a distinct advantage over our free-to-air television competitors. The national free-to-air television stations are uplinked to the same satellite used by our service and consequently form part of the bouquet available to our subscribers. |
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| The Combination |
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| International Broadcasting Corporation Public Company Limited, or IBC, as we were referred to before May 1998, acquired the cable television business formerly operated by Telecom Holdings Company Limited and its subsidiaries, including Asia Multimedia, in exchange for a 49.5% shareholding in IBC effective May 4, 1998.
The acquisition and related transactions consisted of:
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IBC acquiring a 97.9% shareholding in TrueVisions Cable from Telecom Holdings; |
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IBC acquiring a 99.9% shareholding in Cineplex Company Limited from Telecom Holdings; | |
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| IBC’s signal transmission and distribution subsidiary, Satellite Service, acquiring certain set-top box and cable transmission assets from Asia Multimedia and Network Engineering Consultant Company Limited; and an agreement between our subsidiary, TrueVisions Cable, and Asia Multimedia under which TrueVisions Cable leased carrying capacity on Asia Multimedia’s cable network. In addition, Asia Multimedia agreed to supply certain other related services |
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