The agreement between partners was not signed, and as from December 1 the satellite operator will give up broadcasting a number of Discovery Channels, as the Kommersant informs.
The suspended channels also include Eurosport and TLC. The revenue sharing agreement failed, and the operator had to give up a whole package of channels. The information was proved by the “Media Alliance”, which incorporates those channels.
The cooperation was previously maintained on a revenue sharing basis, i.e. “Tricolor” paid a fraction of earnings from subscribers to the “Media Alliance”. For the time being, the latter’s CEO Gregory Lavrov stated that the satellite operator set forth conditions that would make further cooperation impossible.
“Tricolor” just announced to its subscribers that the package would be completed by similar educational channels.
Let us specify that among the TV channels dismissed by “Tricolor” there are Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, Eurosport and women’s channel TLC.
Discovery is a large-scale market player. Earning a lot on advertising, it also holds near 0.37% of all the Russians in front of TV (data for January-October of present year).
“Tricolor”, in turn, the army of which accounts for one third of total pay-TV market, behaves very ambiguous. For example, in early autumn of present year, the operator announced the suspended broadcasts of a number of TV channels like “My Planet”, “Science 2.0”, “Russian Romance”, etc. because of revising contracts with its partners. At that, the operator assured that those channels would have worthy substitutes, and then the content would be expanded due to “Tricolor”’s own channels. Later on, the situation was settled, but it was not the first time when the operator turned out incomprehensible both to VGTRK, and own subscribers.
