Kozar may leave the platform
By : Anna Kocinska
The sales and distribution departments of Canal+Polska's digital platform Cyfra+ could be turned over to United Pan-Europe Communications (UPC) owner of rival platform Wizja TV and the company's director general, Christian Kozar, may be replaced, a source who wished to remain anonymous said last week.
While market insiders have predicted that a merger between the nation's top digital platforms was in the final negotiating stage and would happen in a few weeks, the news of Kozar's departure came as a complete surprise.
Paulina Krasinska, spokeswoman for Canal+ Polska, denied the news. "We know absolutely nothing about (Kozar's) leaving Poland, I categorically deny it," she said. "Those speculations might have come from the fact that Kozar was appointed general director of Canal+ in Belgium but this doesn't mean he won't hold his position in Poland."
Kozar, who was on a business trip to the United States Friday, was unavailable for comment.
According to sources, Canal+'s denial may be part of Vivendi Universal's and UPC's policy to remain tight-lipped about the deal. Vivendi, which holds a 48.5% stake in Canal+ via Groupe Canal+, is negotiating the merger of Poland's digital platforms with UPC.
Przemyslaw Szmyt, the former chief executive officer of Wizja TV, said Canal+'s denial fits into the logic of UPC and Vivendi negotiations. "It's highly probable if you look at the context of those negotiations," Szmyt said. "UPC is above all a distributor and Canal+ a content provider." Szmyt said that in Poland, UPC has a larger distribution platform than Canal+. Wizja TV has 388,000 subscribers and UPC Telewizja Kablowa has 1 million subscribers. In comparison, Canal+ has no cable operations and 352,000 digital subscribers.
"I think that UPC's and Vivendi's philosophy now is to separate distribution from content and I expect that as a result of the merger Canal+ would take over a great deal of content production (in Poland)," Szmyt said. "Remember that we've recently seen UPC limit its production of programming in Poland." In March, UPC closed down Wizja TV's flagship Polish-language channel, Wizja One. "And they stopped buying expensive sports programs for Wizja Sport," Szmyt said.
While there are still no indications how the merger will be concluded, Szmyt said it might take the form of a share exchange. "In this case they will need to fix an exchange parity for which the number of subscribers might become one of the basic criteria," he said. "This might have been one of the reasons why UPC decided, not quite legally, to include two channels of (public television) Telewizja Polska (TVP) into its platform."
Because TVP's absence might have affected Wizja TV's subscriber growth rate, last week the platform ended a two-year battle to include TVP into its package of programs and did it without TVP's consent. Until now, TVP was present on Cyfra+ because Robert Kwiatkowski, TVP's president, had been against putting the station's programming on Wizja's platform, sources said.
At the same time, Canal+ also plans to expand its digital subscriber base, which is why it recently tempted analog subscribers with a promotional offer that allows them to switch to Cyfra+.
UPC's direct-to-home (DTH) subscribers in Central Europe dropped from 474,000 in the fourth quarter of last year to 466,300 on March 31. In Poland, UPC has 388,800 subscribers, down from 414,000 in December. By comparison, Cyfra+ had 352,000 subscribers in the first quarter of this year, up from 300,000 in December.
The current attempt to create a single digital platform in Poland is not the first. In 1998, U.S.-based @Entertainment (owner of Wizja TV and the PTK cable network later purchased by UPC) and Canal+ Polska failed to form a single digital television platform. In April of that year the two companies signed a letter of intent to merge their digital platforms, but halted talks June 1, citing irreconcilable differences.
