Philippine TV networks to compete for airtime on smartphones

February 12, 2014 Leave a comment

Philippine TV networks to compete for airtime on smartphones

February 10, 2014

by Phoebe Magdirila

Last December, Philippine television network ABS-CBN announced its foray into mobile. Through ABS-CBNmobile, the new telco has launched a live-streaming app for its customers, following a growing trend among Philippines TV networks.

ABS-CBNmobile is heavily promoting the iWant TV

app through commercials on its traditional TV channel. The app lets its users live stream the station’s TV shows to their mobile devices. The new telco doesn’t have postpaid plans as of yet, but it currently offers online access through prepaid plans from Php 15 (US$0.33) at 30 MB for one day up to Php 449 (US$10) for 1200 MB for 30 days.

Before the official launch of ABS-CBNmobile, the iWant TV website generated 36.3 million views in March last year. That success spurred the company to move iWant TV onto mobile devices. While we don’t have access to the telco’s latest figures, it reported releasing 200,000 SIM cards in the market as of December.

More competition

Following this, just shortly after the announcement of ABS-CBN’s telco business, its competitor, TV5, announced that it will launch its own mobile platform this year through telco Smart Communications.

TV5 president Emmanuel Lorenzana also told InterAksyon that the mobile offering will be used to expand its advertising footprint. He says the mobile capability can help to make people enjoy the ads. Both TV5 and Smart Communications are under the PLDT Group, so it looks like it will use the infrastructure of its sister telco company to provide content to its users.

Meanwhile, GMA Network is also in talks with two of the Philippine telcos to move into video streamingthroughmobile devices. It has also created an app allowing people to watch news videos on their iPhones.

Last year, research firm TNS stated in its Mobile Life 2013 study that video streaming is one of the potential growth areas in the Philippines.

Filed under TMT Trends

About bambooinnovator
Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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