Orange outage in Poland

Orange has suffered a massive outage in many parts of Poland.

As a result, report several local news outlets, many of its customers have been unable to make calls or access the internet.

Company spokesman Wojtek Jabczynski sent a tweet late afternoon on Thursday (July 7) apologising for the incident and saying that it was working to fix the issue as quickly as possible.

The outage began around 17.00 on July 7 and was most pronounced in Warsaw. However, it was also widely felt in a number of other locations including Katowice, Poznan, Szczecin and the tri-city of Gdansk, Gdynia and Sopot.

Orange is the incumbent telco in Poland and the country’s leading provider of IPTV services.

The outage was reportedly resolved at 02.00 local time on Friday, July 8.

Orange gains TV customers

Orange ended the first quarter with 6,579,000 IPTV and DTH subscribers in its home market France, up from 6,163,000 in the same period last year.

Meanwhile in Romania, Orange saw strong growth in the take-up of it satellite TV service, its March 31 subscriber total being, at 294,000, 54.5% up on a year earlier.

In Poland, Orange ended Q1 with 797,000 TV customers, or 5.4% more than a year earlier.

Elsewhere, Orange ended Q1 with 365,000 TV customers, or 2.8 times the number a year earlier, with the figure including Jazztel.

The Orange group had revenues of €10 billion in Q1, up 0.6% year-on-year, while its restated EBITDA was €2.6 billion (-1.6%, or +0.3% excluding group employee share plan). Capex stood at €1.5 billion (+10.4%).

In CEE, Broadband TV News notes than Orange Polska’s net income in Q1 was 42.7% lower than a year. In Romania, its revenues were up by 6.5% year-on-year.

Orange presents strategic plan to 2020

Essentials2020, Orange’s new strategic plan

PARIS — Orange presented its new strategic plan to 2020 today, called “Essentials2020” building on the “Conquests 2015” plan launched in 2010.

TV-related extracts:

In Spain, the Group will continue to expand its fiber network and its TV offering with the aim of doubling convergent revenues by 2018. The proposal to acquire Jazztel, which is currently being examined by the European Commission, will enable the Group to reinforce and accelerate this strategy that aims to reach 10 million connectable homes by the end of 2016.

In Belgium, a market characterized by strong cable coverage, Orange will test the use of this technology through the launch of a TV offering in 2015 that will be significantly different from existing market offerings.

The Group will build on the quality of its networks, particularly in very high-speed broadband, to develop uses and deliver what the customer wants by offering a multi-screen experience with richer content. This is already the case with the Group’s new TV interface, Polaris.

Thanks to the TV stick, which was recently launched in Romania and will soon be introduced to the French market – Orange customers can access Orange TV and related content at home simply by connecting the HDMI stick to their television sets.

More: Essentials2020, Orange’s new strategic plan

Orange to launch HDMI dongle to combat Netflix

Orange is launching its own HDMI dongle called Orangecast offering a multitude of OTT services.

Modelled on Google’s Chromecast, the dongle will offer access to the VOD service of Orange Cinema Series, streaming local and international TV stations, music from Deezer and games, according to a report in L’Express.

“We will soon commercialise this product and offer a product that is different from Google,” said Stéphane Richard, the CEO of Orange, last May. The move is to confront Netflix, which is due to launch this September in France.

As the planned Orangecast will make any modern TV set with a HDMI port into a connected TV set, the new device will allow Orange to roll out its services across France, also to broadband customers of ither providers. In addition, Orange can also offer the service, or selected parts of it, outside France – for instance to the overseas territories and departments.

The company would not comment to L’Express on the matter other than to confirm that it was working on a dongle without giving any information on the service’s content or launch date.

Orange to stick with set-top boxes

“The set-top box is still the preferred the device in the living room [for Orange],” said Erwan Nedellec, senior expert on TV services, Orange.

Although Orange has been very active in getting its services directly to smart TVs and connected devices, Nedellec says the process hasn’t always been smooth sailing

“We work on the same ecosystem, but we come from different planets. The telco’s goal is to keep STBs in the field as long as they can, while the CE manufacturers’ goal is to sell as many TVs as they can.”

Orange has launched its live streaming directly to XBox 360 Live (April 2012), Samsung (February 2013), and LG (July 2013). VOD is now also available on XBox (April 2013) and Samsung (July 2013)

“Our experience has been positive in many ways. There are innovative devices, we have a good relationship with partners, constructive exchanges, and there are co-marketing opportunities. But we also identified several topics thet we must improve together.”

Problem with smart TVs is the fact that the development cycle is different from that of the telco’s ecosystem. Every CE manufacturer has between two and four different platforms and also has several firmware versions in the field.

At Orange “we have reference of all possible configurations of our ecosystem; this is not possible with CE devices, so it is very hard for our hotlines and technicians to help our customers when they call us with problems.”

So Orange will stick with STBs for the time being “Yes, STBs represents an important part of the capex, but relying on CE devices include costs side effects as well.”

So for the telcos “it is crucial to use technologhies used by the whole ecosystem and avoid specific developments.” For CE manufacturers “there is a mismatch between develoipment lifecycle of services, sand the development of smart TVs.”