Casema

» see casema.nl as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Casema's head office stood in The Hague in a building finished in 1919 to a design by Daniël Knuttel, in the Amsterdam School style, and listed today by the city's monuments office. Until the 1990s that building housed the Postcheque- en Girodienst, the ancestor of ING. The cable company moved into a bank's old premises and stayed there until the brand was retired.

The company was founded on 7 January 1970 as Centrale Antenne Systemen Exploitatie Maatschappij, and no cable television operator in the Netherlands came before it. It held the largest network for many years afterward. The founding share register is the interesting part. Ninety percent went to Nozema, the state broadcast transmission company, and six percent to the Dutch state itself. The last four percent was split one percent each between the public broadcasters AVRO, KRO, NCRV and VARA. Cable in the Netherlands began life as an arm of public broadcasting, with the commercial logic arriving much later.

Then it was sold, repeatedly. When the PTT was turned into KPN, Nozema transferred part of its Casema holding to KPN as compensation for the state keeping its Nozema shares. Nozema and the broadcasters sold the rest to KPN in 1997 according to the Dutch account, and KPN passed Casema to France Télécom the same year. The English article dates that sale to 1998 instead, and neither side cites the other, so this grave records the conflict and leaves it there. In 2003 it was resold to a group of American and British investors led by the Carlyle Group and GMT Communications, with Providence Equity Partners alongside them. In July 2006 Cinven and Warburg Pincus bought it for 2.1 billion euros.

~ the dossier ~

~ the roll-up ~

Warburg Pincus already owned Multikabel, bought in 2005 for 530 million euros. On 3 August 2006 it and Cinven bid 2.6 billion euros for Essent Kabelcom, later renamed @Home; the Dutch competition authority cleared the deal on 8 December 2006 and it completed on 31 January 2007. At that point one pair of owners held three cable networks covering roughly 3.3 million customers, and the only remaining question was which brand would survive.

None of them did. The integration came first and the name change last: @Home and Casema aligned their telephony and internet pricing and their connection speeds on 1 July 2007, Multikabel followed on 1 September, and television pricing was levelled across all three. The merger of the three companies was completed on 16 May 2008, and the Dutch record says plainly that from that date the activities continued under the name Ziggo.

Nothing in this resembles how cable worked where I grew up. Turkish cable television was laid and operated by the state telephone company, one owner from the start, so a regional cable monopoly changing hands three times in nine years is a species I know from documents alone. The part I can follow is the paperwork.

~ the name ~

Ziggo was invented. Staff were invited to suggest names under a constraint that no part of any predecessor's name could appear in the result, and the Dutch encyclopedia entry notes plainly that Ziggo is therefore not a reference to anything or anyone. Thirty-eight years of Casema, an acronym that unpacked into a sentence about operating central antenna systems, were replaced by two syllables chosen for meaning nothing at all.

casema.nl has no DNS record today. The networks are all still live under Ziggo, which merged with UPC Nederland in 2015 and was folded into the VodafoneZiggo joint venture at the end of 2016. The cable in the ground has now outlasted every company name ever attached to it.

~ the technical half ~

Casema ran EuroDocsis for internet and cable telephony and DVB-C for digital television, and it had networks in The Hague and Utrecht among a dozen other towns. Orange also sold internet access over Casema's network, a leftover from the France Télécom years.

The Dutch write-up is unusually frank about what the company was known for. It was in the news regularly for being early with digital television, HDTV, IPTV and WiMAX, and it was in the news regularly because its customer service could not cope with the volume of questions those launches produced. Both halves of that reputation sit in the same sentence of the Dutch record, side by side, neither one softened.

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