After working for the public broadcaster of Turkey, Turkish Radio & Television -TRT- for 25 years I have been retired in March 2023.  I am happy to announce that, with my extensive bunch of knowledge on the broadcasting market, I decided to start my own business as a consultant in broadcasting. Details of the business will be announced soon. 

It was 2013, when RTUK (The Supreme Council of Radio & Television in Turkey) held a frequency allocation tender for digital terrestrial television. This tender was canceled with court decisions due to some objections.  It seems that in 2019, there will be a new tender for frequencies, this time not only for digital terrestrial television but also for analogue & digital radio. The details of the tender is not yet announced. On 23 December 2018, RTÜK issued a regulation which describes the subject. In the first week of 2019, I am planning to write on this regulation... Please keep following...

According to the data in the  report  of the Supreme Council of ICT, the market share of payTV is just 31%.  There are about 6,1M subscribers to payTV services in Turkey, where total number of households is assumed to be 20M. When we look at the distribution of technology; the payTV market is dominated by satellite, number of subscribers of CableTV is constant, IPTV is increasing but not as fast as expected. The OTT numbers are not available. I guess OTT is the main reason of slow progress in IPTV. 

According to the data in the report of the Supreme Council of ICT, the market share of payTV is just 30%.  There are about 6M subscribers to payTV services in Turkey, where total number of households is assumed to be 20M. FTA: Free to Air / Ücret ödemeden izlenilen televizyon PayTV subscribers are mainly taking service via satellite, 69%. Cable has a static number of subscribers, which is around 1,2M which makes 20% of payTV and IPTV has more to do, with just 11% of market share. PayTV operators should concentrate on increasing the market itself, before their share in the market. But as nearly all TV channels are FTA in Turkey, it is not a simple task.

It is my pleasure to introduce you Mr. Uygar BOYNUDELİK. He is a friend of mine who is working in the media business in Turkey.  1. Dear Mr. Boynudelik, let me start with a classical question. Can you please introduce yourself for my readers.  Dear Özgür, let me first start by thanking you for regulary writing blog posts and being so sincere and transparent and open-hearted as opposed to the general positioning in the industry. Frankly, I'm a fan of yours, truly :) Anyway, I can simply call myself an engineer who is quite interested in TV technologies. I'm really enjoying reading, writing, researching about it. This is what I do for a living (I’m in charge of STB product management in Turkcell) and also my beloved hobby. I keep writing on www.uygarboynudelik.com in Turkish and on www.turkishtvmarket.info in English since many years. I encourage your readers to have a look my web sites, at the end we’re living in a small industry J

I am glad to post an e-interview with Mr. Andrej Kostrasevic, CEO of Nomads. Before the Q/A, I would like to give a brief information about the Nomads. Mr. Andrej Kostresevic Nomads is a full-stack multiscreen engineering company that specializes in the rapid development of custom direct to consumer Internet-video delivery products. It signature product NomadTV is a comprehensive white label OTT-as-a-service, which lets any content owner launch their own Netflix-like apps for mobile, web and connected devices, with support for the most popular business models - Amazon Video On Demand (AVOD), Subscription Video On Demand (SVOD), and Transactional Video On Demand (TVOD). For more information visit  www.Nomads.co . 1. There is a trend to consume video more then watch TV. With this trend I think that the traditional TV networks will lose power and content creators will have the chance to bargain directly with the new aggregators. On the otherhand this new aggrega...

I have been using LinkedIn frequently. I post some updates on DTT and digital radio transition in Turkey. I found out that there are not enough source of information on these subjects. So, although it is extra work for me, I try to post my comments on these in English also.  Recently Mr. Esat ÇIPLAK, gave a speech on DTT transition in Turkey. He is one of the members of Supreme Council of Radio & Television in Turkey, namely RTÜK. There are nine members of RTÜK. Mr. ÇIPLAK claims that there is no need to build a new DTT network as there are very little percentage left watching analog terrestrial television. According to Mr. ÇIPLAK, even in Europe percentage of population watching television via DTT is decreasing. As you well know, Turkey has not yet build DTT. So, Mr. ÇIPLAK claims that the UHF band should be released to mobile operators. Mobile operators will use the frequency band more efficient.  I posted a comment on these in my blog in Turkish. Thinking of ...

People are curious about Turkish tv market. They are trying to learn what is going to happen in DTT progress. Before writing about DTT, let me first share three graphs showing the current PayTV market of Turkey. There are appr. 20M houses in Turkey.  First graph shows PayTV versus FTA: As you can see PayTV is just %30, which is not that high. Next graph is satellite / cable share: Cable is %20, satellite is %80. Turkey is a satellite country.  The last graph shows the share of PayTV among companies. Digitürk, DSmart & Filbox are DTH platforms. Turkcell TV & Tivibu are IPTV platforms and Kablo TV is a cable tv solution. As you can see from this graph, satellite is the market leader.

It was a successful workshop in the sense that there were more than 160 delegates all over the Europe. Half of the delegates were from Turkey, which is understandable. As far as I remember, this was the first event of DigiTAG in Turkey. When we look at the members of DigiTAG, we see no one from Turkey. I hope that the event will be a beginning of understanding the importance of being a member of DigiTAG also.  I will write a more detailed coverage of the event. But as a first impressions, I believe these were the results of the event, regarding the DTT journey of Turkey: All parties in the DTT process, namely broadcasters, supreme council, equipment manufacturers are unhappy with the current uncertainty of the process. If we remember the last developments, supreme council has finished the tender process. There was a claim to court and court decided to suspend the licences tender for the national broadcasters. This suspend affect whole DTT process, becau...

It was my first time in that north of Europe. First of all I should thank to Levira, for their hospitality. They were amazing. The conference, the party, the organization were all fabulous. Hope to attend their events in future.  You can find my presentation slides in this post. Below each slide I will try to write some comments, hopefully will be explanatory.   Turkey is a big country with a population above 75 millions. Free to air satellite is dominant way of TV reception. Digital terrestrial network is not built yet. Plan is to switch off the analogue terrestrial by March 2015. When we look at the numbers, it can easily be seen that number of households receiving TV through analogue terrestrial decreases steadily. Actually it was almost equal in 2006, when the first attempts for DTT started. payTV is immature in Turkey. There is a lot to do regarding payTV. Numbers are not exact. I could not find the exact numbers of subscribers...

I wrote this post in Turkish yesterday and share it on DVB-T2 group in Linkedin. I am a little bit surprised to see that some of the members of the group wanted to read it in English. That's why I will try to write some what same in English also. As you may already know that there is no DTT network in Turkey yet. I mean we will build DVB-T2 directly. First of all license tender have been made. National & regional licensees are given and local ones are in the process. There will be 11 HD & 22 SD national broadcasters. In each region , there are 7 regions in Turkey (geographically, not administratively), there will be 4 SD broadcasters and in each city (local) there will be 7 SD broadcasters. Adding TRT (public service broadcaster of Turkey) to these this will be 54 broadcaster in each city. But is this the case after the license tenders? There are 11 HD & 22 SD national broadcasters who paid (actually as a result of tender took the license for 10 years fo...

With the recent tenders, digital terrestrial television licensees are given by Supreme Council of Radio & Television in Turkey. Infect the results of the tender is some how surprising; total revenue of Supreme Council is 820.850.000 TL, which is appr. 350.000.000 €. When we think of regional and local licensees, total amount will be nearly 1.000.000.000 TL What is the reason of this huge amount of money? Why do broadcasters agree to pay this amount for a license with which just 10 % is watching TV? What is the business plan behind this scene? These are questions in my mind. If I figure out some answers, you can be sure that I will share with you. If you have any answers, please do not hesitate to share with me, and other readers. I will appreciate your support.

As you all know digital terrestrial television license tender in progress. I want to write on the first results of the tenders. There will be national, regional and local licenses. Results of the national general HD licenses are some what surprising. In Turkey license of satellite and cable broadcast tv and  is 210.000 TL / 10 years, the minimum price for DTT national HD general was 3.000.000 TL. After the tender the minimum price for a licence was 48.800.000 TL. It is 232 times greater then license for satellite or cable.  Another interesting thing is that in Turkey, there are just 10% or less left, receiving tv from analog terrestrial. It can be thought that DTT license is a prestigious asset, that's why this license fee is so high. Even though we think like that, I believe it is not enough to explain the gap between license fees among two types of distribution channels. We will wait and see what these results mean. Keep following my blog in order to keep informe...

First phase of DTT license tender is made today. According to the news from Anadolu Agency broadcasters who won the license for 10 years is as follows: AKS Televizyon Reklamcılık ve Filmcilik Anonim Şirketi (Show TV) Ciner Medya TV Hizmetleri Anonim Şirketi (Haber Türk) D TV Haber ve Görsel Yayıncılık Anonim Şirketi (Kanal D) Huzur RadyoTV Anonim Şirketi (FOX) Işıl Televizyon Yayıncılık Anonim Şirketi (Star TV) Samanyolu Yayıncılık Hizmetleri Anonim Şirketi (Samanyolu TV) Turkuvaz Aktif TV Prodüksiyon Anonim Şirketi (Turkuvaz Aktif TV) Yaşam Televizyon Yayıncılık Hizmetleri Anonim Şirketi (Kanal Türk) When we look deeper to the results we see that Çukurova, Doğan, Doğuş, Samanyolu, Ciner, Turkuvaz groups has won an HD national general license.