Forthnet Group Signs New Contracts With Eutelsat to Launch Triple Play Services

Wednesday, August 24th, 2011
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Forthnet Group to Bundle NOVA pay-TV Services With Eutelsat’s Tooway™ Satellite Broadband Solution

PARIS and ATHENS, Greece — Forthnet Group (Athens:FORTH), Greece’s leading private broadband and pay-TV service provider (under the NOVA brand name), today announced the expansion of its longstanding commercial relationship with Eutelsat Communications (Euronext Paris: ETL).

A five-year distribution agreement enabling Forthnet Group to market the new-generation Tooway™ broadband service to users across Greece and Cyprus has been signed with Skylogic, Eutelsat’s broadband affiliate. Tooway™ is provided by Eutelsat’s powerful KA-SAT High Throughput Satellite, a new wireless broadband infrastructure for Europe.

Eutelsat and Forthnet Group have in parallel entered into a broader commercial agreement to ensure future satellite capacity for NOVA at Eutelsat’s flagship HOT BIRD™ video neighbourhood in order to launch new premium services and accelerate the acquisition of pay-TV subscribers.

With these new contracts, Forthnet Group will be the first operator in Europe to bundle the Tooway™ broadband service with its pay-TV portfolio in order to offer users triple-play services through a single satellite dish and a single subscription. Satellite broadband, with download speeds of up to 10 Mbps and upload speeds of up to 4 Mbps, together with VOIP will start to be commercialised in Q4 2011 and offered in combination with NOVA pay-TV. The full service will be delivered via Tooway™ antennas equipped with a dual-feed in order to access broadband from the KA-SAT satellite and NOVA from the HOT BIRD™ satellites.

Yiannis Kavaklis, Forthnet Group’s Chief Commercial Officer, commented: “We are particularly satisfied withthe extension of the cooperation of Forthnet Group with Eutelsat Communications. It concerns an agreement that enables us to extend the reach of our broadband and combined broadband and Pay-TV offering to all Greek households, regardless of their geographical location.The combination of premium content offered by NOVA Pay-TV with broadband through Eutelsat’s specialised High Throughput Satellite is in line with our strategy to offer affordable, easy to use and quality services to Greek households. Covering unserved areas also presents the Group with the commercial opportunity to extend its broadband customer base beyond its fixed line coverage.

This agreement also allows us to complement our Pay-TV offering in Cyprus with high-speed broadband services, offering a complete solution to the dynamic Cypriot market.”

Andrew Wallace, Eutelsat’s Chief Commercial Officer, added: “These new agreements with Forthnet Group underline our commitment to providing clients with a range of state-of-the-art and complementary services that equip them to retain, broaden and diversify their subscriber base. By bundling pay-TV services from our HOT BIRD™ neighbourhood with the Tooway™ broadband service from KA-SAT, Forthnet is leveraging an exceptional opportunity to offer users simple and immediate access to premium programming and Internet access in one package. This is an exciting strategic development that we look forward to sharing with Forthnet so that users beyond terrestrial infrastructure have viewing choice and access to the benefits of broadband.”

According to a public consultation for the report “White Areas of Greece for 2011” published by the Ministry of Regional Development and Competitiveness for the Digital Agenda, Greece represents a significant market opportunity for satellite broadband. Despite deployment of terrestrial broadband, there are still more than 800,000 unserved citizens in Greece, which ranks 23rd of the EU27 member states in terms of broadband penetration.