Supreme council for Information Technologies and Communication announced new report on electronic communication sector of Turkey. There are some important numbers regarding television business also. I will try to comment on these numbers: Cable TV subscribers are 1213517. This number was 1277355 in the fşrst quarter of 2012. There are not many changes in this number. Home pass of cable tv is about 2,5 millions. Half of the potential is said to be subscripted to cable tv. Actually the number does not increase for a while.I do not know any expansion plans of the cable also. It has been argued for a while to expand the offer via OTT.  IPTV subscribers are 213695.There is only one IPTV service in Turkey, which is offered by a company of Turk Telekom, namely TTNet. I think that the number of subscribers should be more. There are surely some reasons of this, which I do not want to go deeper. May be one day, the IPTV operation in Turkey, will be researched by academics.  Number...

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...

It is surprising to learn that Court has decided to suspend the tenders for national digital terrestrial television. Supreme Council, made an announcement stating this decision. It is not yet clear what will happen next. I mean, national licensees are key point in the DTT transition process. Because the share holders of the antenna company should have the national terrestrial licensee. Another interesting point is that according to the law number 6112, RTUK can not organize a new tender for national broadcaster as in the law it is stated that all tender processes should be completed within 2 years time. What will happen next is the main question in minds. I believe that Parliament will make a change in the law and give permission to RTUK to organize an new tender. But, Parliament is closed now. So, this will take time.  Actually, whole process will take time. It was planned to start DTT broadcast in Ankara on 1'st of November. It seems that we should wait a little bit more. ...

Hope that it is interesting to read my insights about DTT in Turkey. It is my pleasure to announce that I will be presenting about DTT in Turkey at Levira's Digital Broadcasting event in Tallinn. It will be my first time in Tallinn and actually in that north part of Europe. In my presentation I will mention the important dates about DTT, which comes from the broadcasting act 6112. I will also discuss the factors which affect the success of ASO.  As you may well know that Turkey is some what late in DTT process. It may be argued that this gives Turkey an important advantage to choose DVB-T2 and start DTT directly with DVB-T2. But the TV market in Turkey is different than all other CEE countries. There are only 2 DTH Pay TV operators, one cable and one IPTV operator. Nearly 70 % of households receive TV through satellite. Cable, is not an important alternative. Hence, DTT may give the people an interesting alternative. Some argue that comparing with 1000 channels with sate...

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...

Day 2 of iTVF event hosted an important discussion: digital radio standard. There were important presentations from WorldDMB , Digital Radio Mondial e, EBU , RadioDNS and Sony . Session started with the key note speech of Mr. Taha YÜCEL, deputy chairman of Supreme Council of Radio & Television. He addressed some legal issues regarding the transition period from analogue to digital in radio broadcasting.  It may not be quite clear for some that 3G / 4 G or WiMax can not replace broadcast. Let me try to explain this a little more. Technologies of cellular phones or WiFi depends on unicast streams. Where each and every user / consumer sends a request to the server and a unique stream starts from server to the consumer. It is one - to - one type of service.  In the broadcast world however things occur differently. Service is send from the transmitter (like the server in unicast world) to the air. All consumers get the same if they are in the cov...

For more than 10 years I am attending TV Conferences in Istanbul. Name of the event was Cebit Broadcast Cable & Satellite Fair & Conference. I presented papers at this event two times in different years. By the time this event is combined with Cebit IT and conference part of the event disappeared totally. I am very glad to see that RATEM organized a special event for TV sector in Turkey. I should mention that iTVF is not just about technical part of TV. It is also an event to meet content owners with international sales firms. It can be thought as a combination of Mippcom & IBC. But of course it is just a small version of both events. At least for this year. There were two day discussions on digital TV and digital radio. It may sound unbelievable but in Turkey digital terrestrial television network is not yet constructed. In nearly all European countries DTT network is built, and again in many Analog has been switched off. We are a little bit late for both and time...