[Paris 09-12-13] The \u201c<\/b>Regional Operators: Asia\u201d panel at World Satellite Business Week painted an optimistic future for the key regional players in the region, with strong DTH advances likely to be the catalyst. \u201cWe see a lot of growth in video, new markets are opening up. We believe DTH is the future driver of growth,\u201d said William Wade, CEO, AsiaSat<\/b>. \u201cIn South East Asia, you have huge potential markets to address. There will be a significant level of growth coming from DTH applications with DTH in Asia; it is still quite early. We also think consolidation will help strengthen the market, and bring about more growth.\u201d<\/p>\n
For Measat Satellite Systems<\/b>, growth in video is also key to its prospects going forward. \u201cThere is a very strong story for DTH. Our core business is DTH. We are in a strong growth phase, our current focus is expanding capacity to our existing customers \u2013 our DTH customers are needing more capacity,\u201d said Paul Brown Kenyon, CEO, Measat Satellite Systems. Although, he admits we could start to see some consolidation among DTH players in the region, especially in India and Indonesia. \u201cI think in India, there will be room for around four operators. We support Sun Direct<\/b> and Reliance TV<\/b>. They could get together. We would support those two customers to get together,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
Nile Suwansiri, SVP, marketing and business development, Thaicom<\/b>, said the company was optimistic there would be increased demand for bandwidth in Thailand given there is likely to be a significant ramp-up in the number of HD channels that will be bought to market.<\/p>\n
Tom Choi, CEO, Asia Broadcast Satellite<\/b> (ABS) <\/b>said the company would continue to invest aggressively in new satellites going forward and that, like others in the region, DTH is the key behind the company\u2019s ability to generate significant revenues. He said that the company\u2019s ABS 2 satellite \u2013 which launches early next year \u2013 will have an 86 percent fill rate. ABS\u2019s current backlog is $900 million, and in 2014, it will go beyond $1 billion, according to Choi. \u201cThe migration bandwidth on ABS 2 is around 30 percent, so 50-plus percent is new capacity. Our business model is that we use older satellites, to kick-start a location. Once that is done, we will design a satellite to meet requirements. Eighty percent of that $900 million backlog is from DTH customers,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
The panel also debated the future of High Throughput Satellites (HTS) and there was some reticence as to what impact they could have in Asia. Wade said the business case for HTS was \u201cunproven\u201d at this stage, and Brown Kenyon was worried the impact O3b Networks<\/b> might have on its VSAT business. \u201cWe can\u2019t see a compelling application for O3b in Malaysia. Now O3b is launched, it is up there and there is no going back. We are concerned about pricing issues here and this could impact our VSAT business,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Choi added that it was difficult to see the business case for a dedicated HTS in Asia, and pointed to the proliferation of wireless technologies as a reason why there may not be enough demand for capacity on these satellites.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
[Paris 09-12-13] The \u201cRegional Operators: Asia\u201d panel at World Satellite Business Week painted an optimistic future for the key regional players in the region, with strong DTH advances likely to be the catalyst. \u201cWe see a lot of growth in video, new markets are opening up. We believe DTH is the future driver of growth,\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":80100,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-80099","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80099"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80099"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80099\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/80100"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80099"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80099"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80099"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}