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Programming Poland
Programming Poland
It may be hard to believe, but there is one small part of England’s garden county that is forever Polish. For satellite broadcaster Wizja TV is based in the tidy, unflashy Maidstone studios once occupied by former ITV compa- ny TVS, and from the outside is distinguished only by freshly planted gardens and some sus- piciously large satellite dishes.
A subsidiary of the publicly quoted American company @Entertainment Inc, the success story of Wizja TV is all the more remarkable for the fact that officially it has only been in operation since September 1998. But in that time the satellite plat- form has established an identity within its market, bringing 22 digitally broadcast channels to a TV hun- gry country with an economy that is developing at a fast rate itself.
Wizja TV’s English chief executive officer is David Warner - ironically a former general manager of TVS - and the rapid rise of his latest compa-
ny is perhaps the most satisfying of a long
and distinguished career. This takes in man- agement roles all over the world, and top
quality tv production that includes Upstairs
Do w n s t ai r s , Do c t o r I n T h e H o u s e a n d
Edward & Mrs Simpson. He recalls the ori-
gins of the Polish satellite ‘revolution’.
“I remember getting a call from my chair- man Robert Fowler in 1997, and he told me that the company wanted to launch a digital platform into Poland. I said that was interest- ing, I’d been there quite a few times before and liked it. It’s a big market with about 40 million homes, and 12 million television homes. They decided that the operational base was either going to be in the UK, Netherlands or Luxembourg. But they hadn’t designed or built the infrastructure at this point.
“I said ‘so what else have you got?’. He
said they wanted to put up 18 channels, and
I obviously asked how many of those had been nego- tiated. The answer came back, none. Plus they had to build a national call centre in Poland. All they had at that point were three transponders. So from then until our launch in September 1998 we bought our current offices in Maidstone, built a brand new call centre in Katowice and organised state-of-the-art staff training. We also negotiated the broadcast rights to 24 channels.”
Having settled upon Maidstone as the best loca- tion - a fact helped by the superb sight lines in every direction from the building, so that the satellite uplink dishes have a clear view south at a precise angle of 19.2 degrees East - the next challenge was setting up an operation that would be able to ride the crest of a new technological wave.
Photos inset above and main: Wizja TV’s UK CEO David Warner.
“When we were starting, digital technology was- n’t widely understood,” Warner continues, “so we had to seek guys from Norway, Sweden and particu- larly Holland to come and help us set up. Starting from a blank bit of paper is very good, but you’re not just designing it you’re going into areas that have never been touched before.
“You’re designing software to make something work which has never been tried before. I decided to get a beginning-to-end solution with Philips, so we designed the set top boxes ourselves, they pro- duced them and we used Philips technology on the encryption. We now use 1200 Philips stores in Poland to sell them, all of which have our own trained point-of-sale people working in them. We have all of our own installers too.
“We’ve spent somewhere in the region of $15 million on the technology and infrastructure here in the UK and in 18 months we’ve gone from zero to 145
selection as any broadcaster anywhere in the world. And now the likes of Fox Kids are taking advantage of the technological capabilities of a digital platform such as this, by adapting and delivering their own channel with a more domestic focus. So, for example, Fox Kids featured Polish band LO27 who took part in their on-air promotion. Some things, however, are the same everywhere.
“The market is in some ways no different from anywhere else.” Warner confirms, “In Poland they love their sport, and anything with a Pole competing in it will get a very passionate audience watching. And while you might try to make a cultural judgement about what they want there isn’t a country that does- n’t want movies, movies, movies and sport. That’s what sells pay television. To that end we bring in 400 hours of live sport out of Poland each year which we produce ourselves with our own sports teams out there. We’ve got our own OB vehicles, SNG link vehi-
cles and we’ve got 35 staff producing sport, and we are planning to launch a full Polish sports channel in September this year.”
Having made UK broadcasting history by becoming the first commercial digital platform within these islands, no-one at Wizja TV intends to rest on their laurels. There is continued investment in equip- ment that is already state-of-the-art, in a platform which has extensive capabilities in promotion, programme making, schedul- ing, engineering and editing, as well as all the important broadcast function, and a remarkably compact library containing a quarter of a million electronically cata- logued tapes. Maybe the future is, quite lit- erally, another country.
“Our satellite ‘footprint’ goes across part of Romania, all of central Europe, Scandinavia, the UK and as far down as Italy,” adds Warner. “So our ability to put
services out into those areas from here is very high, and the demand is definitely there.”
But for now all at Wizja TV - a staff which is 30 per cent Polish in the UK and with its PTK cable com- pany numbers 1000 employees in Poland itself - are looking ahead to servicing their core audience right across Poland.
“At the moment we have the basic 22, 23 chan- nels, with one premium channel, HBO, which is exclu- sive to us for satellite DTH service directly into Poland. Next year I hope we’ll put another two into the basic package, and then we’ll probably start doing pay-per-view, and more interactive products. Poland’s a very dynamic place, and the speed of change is simply quite amazing.” If any company can keep up with it, Wizja TV can. ■ ANWAR BRETT
Wizja TV - continuing to send out the right signals
people, which is still a very tight operation. But we’ve also invested something like $300 million into Poland, where we produce between four and six fea- ture films a year plus and the domestic product for our anchor channel, Wizja 1.”
This final fact provides a major difference between Wizja TV and a pan-European English lan- guage broadcaster like Sky, CNN or the BBC. Warner is certainly sensitive to the needs of his market, and to that end has commissioned extensive research of a country already serviced by seven terrestrial chan- nels and French satellite broadcaster Canal Plus.
By mixing the output of perennial favourites like MTV, the Cartoon Network and blockbuster movies with domestically generated documentaries, series and lifestyle shows, the company carries as varied a
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