Hospital room TV channels find captive audience
Due to a pay-per-view cable TV service set up in more than 60 hospitals around the country, patients no longer have to sit in silence while waiting for their treatment.
Thanks to the Pol TV system, zl. 2 inserted into a hospital-room television set buys patients an hour's worth of viewing time. For zl. 6, patients can watch TV for up to 12 hours with their own headphones and remote control unit. And the hospitals, which have enough financial problems of their own, don't have to spend a penny to do this, said Piotr Micorek, founder and co-owner of Opole-based Pol TV in southern Poland.
"I came up with this idea because I was terribly bored when going with my daughter to the hospital," Micorek said. Pol TV has been installing cable TV in hospitals since 1996. "When I was trying to start this business nobody would believe me. They would ask how it was possible that someone would want to do something practically for free," he said. "The first person that put their trust in me was the director of an Opole maternity hospital, and then it all went smoothly from there."
Micorek said he and his partner invested DM 50,000-DM 100,000 to get the venture started. He also said Pol TV has contracts with "hundreds" of the country's 746 hospitals and has so far supplied more than 3,500 hospital rooms with TVs.
In 1999, Pol TV's revenue increased by 200% over the previous year. But Micorek said the prospects for 2000 are even better. In the first four months of this year, the company had a higher turnover than in the last eight months of 1999. "According to our business plan, we should get a return on our investment in five years," he said.
Micorek said it was important to note that Pol TV's customers are not the hospitals, but the viewers. "It's the patient who pays for our services," Micorek said. "Hospitals can get up to 5% of what patients spend on watching TV, and we also pay for electricity." Pol TV covers all costs for equipment, installation and servicing. Micorek wouldn't specify how much the company forks out to supply one hospital room with a cable TV, headphones and remote control, but he said that, "it depends on the number of patients in a room, and it's not less than several thousand zloty."
Pol TV produces its own television sets, headphones and remote control with the help of Polish TV producer Proelco. "At the beginning, we would buy TV sets but they were too fragile and expensive, and in the end they were damaged too fast," Micorek said. "With our own equipment, we spend less on servicing, about zl. 10 a room per month."
Outfitting more than a dozen new hospitals every month with TVs in addition to servicing the existing 60 facilities could have been too costly for one company, but Micorek said he solved that problem too.
"We granted franchises for installing our system," he said. "Some of our franchisees have networks in more than one town." The franchise "works like McDonald's," he explained. "We build a uniform system but the franchisee pays for it. We sell the license and they own the system." Micorek declined to say how much a license costs.
So far, Pol TV hasn't had any real difficulties persuading hospital directors to install cable TV networks in their facilities.
"We've had it for two years now and while TV has no medical impact on patients, it certainly enhances the standard of our hospital," said Krzysztof Swiderski, director of a Sosnowiec-based hospital. But sources who wished to remain anonymous in Silesia, where Pol TV is particularly active, said that some hospital directors wouldn't accept the TV network without an adequate bribe.
"We never bribe anybody, it's our rule from the very beginning," Micorek said. "If we didn't sign some contracts in the Silesian region it was due to suggestions that we should give a bribe prior to signing them."
Other directors remain reluctant to let Pol TV put a TV in every hospital room. "They (Pol TV) presented their offer, but we finally decided to reject it as we realized that having a TV set in a room with four patients, for instance, could be a source of potential conflict," said Marek Krobicki, director of the Krakow-based Szpital Zakonu Bonifratrow. Micorek agreed that too many channels could become a bone of contention among patients in one room, "but Pol TV provides only a few terrestrial channels, such as Telewizja Polska (TVP) and Polsat." Micorek said Pol TV tried to strike a deal with large cable operators to enhance the firm's offerings. "But to my surprise they weren't really interested, and demanded, for instance, zl. 21 for a socket, which would kill my company (there can be as many as 160 cable sockets in a hospital)."
