Boom Extrasatelit

» see boomextra.ro as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Satellite television is the technology that let a lot of Europe skip cable, and the countries where it landed hardest are the ones where nobody had bothered to wire the villages. Turkey went through exactly this: Digiturk arrived at the end of the 1990s and the dish on the balcony became ordinary faster than anyone expected. Romania got the same wave a few years later, and that is the context Boom was born into and also, eventually, what killed it: a small country with a fast-saturating pay-television market and operators far larger than it already in the field.

DTH Television Group SA was set up in 2004 with Israeli money behind it, principally Elran Investments, with Livermore Investments Group alongside it. Test transmissions went up on the Amos satellite on 21 December 2005 and the commercial service launched in April 2006 as Boom TV. It was the only Romanian platform selling channels in themed packages rather than one fixed bundle, and it carried around ten channels it made itself, the Boom Sport pair among them, plus a radio station. It was also first in the country with pay-per-view films. In 2007 the service was rebranded Boom Extrasatelit.

The growth was real while it lasted. There were 140,000 subscribers by April 2008 and roughly 200,000 by that October, and the count went past 230,000 in March 2009. Revenue climbed from 5 million euros in 2007 to 18 million the year after. Then it stopped. DTH Television Group filed for insolvency in May 2010, had 97,500 customers left by December, and in March 2011 Romtelecom took the assets and the subscriber base and migrated them onto its own Dolce platform.

~ the record ~

~ ten channels ~

The thing Boom did that its competitors did not was make its own programming. Boom Public, Boom Drama, Boom Action, Boom Classic, Boom Comedy and Boom Indian were produced in-house, and so was Boom FM. For a platform of a couple hundred thousand homes that is an enormous amount of channel to fill, and it was the whole differentiation strategy: if you cannot win on price against operators with five times your scale, you win on things they cannot carry.

It also explains the shape of the collapse. Original channels are a fixed cost that does not shrink when subscribers leave. The insolvency administrator's own report put the problem plainly: the subscriber base at the start of 2009 was too small to cover costs, and once the service quality started reflecting that, the customers who could leave did.

~ the subscriber bleed ~

Against Boom's 200,000 in late 2008, RCS and RDS had about a million and Romtelecom had over half a million. That is not a market position, it is a rounding error with a transponder lease, and Romanian pay television was saturating at exactly the wrong moment for the smallest operator in it.

Romtelecom canceled its carriage deal for Boom Sport One in May 2010 and gave its own Dolce customers free months to make up for it, which is roughly when the public could see where this was heading. Three Romanian creditors pushed for bankruptcy. The administrator proposed selling the company to one of the three large operators as the reorganization plan, Romtelecom was the only one that made a firm offer, and the price was set at about 8 million euros with a floor of 7.32 million tied to transferring 95,000 subscribers, reduced per head if fewer came across. The contract was signed in March 2011 and the migration ran through the middle of that year. Nothing kept the name.

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