Aora

» see aora.tv as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

a pay television service is worth exactly as much as the thing you cannot watch anywhere else. aora launched holding two of those things at once and had lost both within twelve months, which is most of what you need to know about why it is dead.

it started broadcasting nationwide in indonesia at the beginning of august 2008, owned by rini soemarno and ongki p. soemarno alongside sugiono wiyono, operated by a company called karyamegah adijaya. the opening package was ten channels. four of them carried nothing but the beijing olympics, because aora had bought the exclusive indonesian rights to the games and timed its own existence to them.

this is the part i can only read about. indonesia is a country i have never lived in, and satellite pay tv there ran on its own rights market under its own regulator. what travels is the shape. anyone who has watched a national football league vanish behind one decoder box knows how this story goes without needing the local details.

~ the dossier ~

~ the olympics gamble ~

launching a satellite platform on a two week sporting event is a real strategy and it has a known failure mode. you sell dishes to people who want one thing, and then the thing ends. aora seems to have understood this, because in the middle of august 2008 it also won the sole indonesian rights to the 2008-09 premier league season and put out a twelve channel package built around them.

that package included espn and star sports, and the pitch was all 370 matches of the season plus the weekly highlights show. for one year, if you wanted english football in indonesia, you bought aora. that is the strongest position a small operator can be in and it is rented by definition.

~ the second life ~

the rights ran out just hours before the 2009-10 season started. aora replaced both football channels with goaltv on 15 august 2009, which is a substitution nobody who had signed up for the premier league accepted. subscribers cancelled and the service shut down before the end of the year.

in january 2011 it came back, and the second version had a completely different theory. no exclusive rights this time, just a cheap package at 59,000 rupiah a month, somewhere near seven dollars. it was aimed at people for whom the incumbent platforms were simply too expensive. that lasted four years, which is longer than the first attempt managed with the olympics and the premier league in hand.

~ the postmortem ~

the ending was ragged. in the weeks before it stopped, channels started dropping off the lineup one at a time and subscribers found they could not get anyone at customer service to answer. then on 23 march 2015 an email went out saying the service would cease operations, on the stated grounds of a satellite realignment. the facebook page posted a farewell the same day.

satellite realignment is a real technical event and it is also the kind of reason a company gives when it does not want to give the other one. a budget platform in a market with better funded rivals does not usually die of orbital mechanics. what killed aora is what nearly killed it in 2009: it never owned anything a subscriber could not get elsewhere for slightly more money.

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