2013 was / is a year of travel for me. I started the year with Paris. I visited London, Krakow, Tallinn and Paris in 2013. I traveled a lot also in Turkey: Gaziantep, Istanbul, Izmir and Canakkale were the cities I visited in 2013.  2014 will be the year of many first times in my life.  Hope that new year brings happiness and joy for everyone. Mary Christmas and happy new year!  Hope to keep updated in PARIS...

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...

DigiTAG, which is established to promote digital terrestrial television broadcasting, will organize a  workshop   in Istanbul on 14 and 15 November 2013 .   This event, which will take place at the Radisson Blue, is extremely important.   There are several reasons for the importance of course: When we look at the  members  of DigiTAG we see broadcasters, network operators (such as Anten AS in Turkey), manufacturers and regulatory / supervisory institutions. In short, we are talking about an organization formed by all actors of the DTT (digital terrestrial television) world. A workshop organized by this structure, will gather the most important names of the sector. Under normal conditions, the names that will not come together easily, will give presentation in Istanbul  with the call of DigiTAG. Digital terrestrial television in many countries in Europe, has become a fact of life. Analog switch off has been made by most of the...

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...