CTH

~ the obituary ~

CTH began as a defensive alliance. In August 2009 more than a hundred Thai cable television operators put up 50 million baht between them and formed Cable Thai Holding, a company whose only job was to buy programming as a bloc and share it out, because individually none of them could negotiate with anyone. In February 2010 it started pushing 26 channels up to the ABS1 satellite for its members to redistribute. It was a cooperative with a satellite uplink, and it worked.

Then in April 2012 the money arrived. Wichai Thongtang, an investor best known as a lawyer who had represented Thaksin Shinawatra, bought 25 percent, and the family behind the Thai Rath newspaper bought another 25 percent. Capital went up to a billion baht and Wichai became chairman. A company that had existed to help small cable operators survive now had ambitions of its own, and in November 2012 it acted on them.

CTH won the English Premier League broadcast rights for Thailand, along with Laos and Cambodia, covering the three seasons from 2013/14, outbidding the incumbent TrueVisions at a price reported at about 320 million dollars. Wikipedia records the price as the highest in Asia and the second highest in the world. It was a bet that the football would drag in everyone who had not yet paid for television.

~ the case file ~

~ the premier league bet ~

The arithmetic was never hidden. CTH said it needed more than seven million subscribers to carry the cost and built packages cheap enough to chase a mass market. It got to about three million. Along the way it picked up a five-year WWE deal and partnered with PSI to push discounted football bundles. In September 2013 it sued Apple and its Thai subsidiary for 100 million baht over an App Store app called Sports Channel that it said was streaming the matches it had just paid for.

Underneath, the alliance it had been built from was coming apart. Management wanted a single unified billing system across the member operators, and the operators who had founded the thing refused, which blocked the subscriber growth the whole plan depended on in its first and most important year. CTH went around them, pushing distribution onto satellite instead of cable, and in doing so competed with its own shareholders.

~ what it cost to win ~

The scale of the hole only became public at the end. According to figures from the Commerce Ministry's Business Development Department, the ten companies trading under the CTH umbrella had over its final two years run up debts of more than 24 billion baht and losses of more than 6.6 billion. The Bangkok Post, reporting in June 2016 that the end was close, put accumulated losses at close to 10 billion baht and noted that the staff was down to about a hundred people and that the senior executives had already resigned.

The rights that caused it were gone by then anyway. CTH had sublicensed Premier League coverage to PPTV for the 2015/16 season, and when the next cycle came up the Qatari broadcaster beIN won it. What CTH had mortgaged itself for was a three-year license, and when it expired the company still carried the debt without the football.

~ the final whistle ~

The shutdown came in stages, which is why sources disagree about the date. The C-band satellite feed stopped carrying CTH programming on 1 February 2016. In early August the company announced it could no longer withstand the economic conditions and would end service on 1 September, and the Ku-band feed went dark on that day. At least one retrospective account dates the close of cable operations to 1 August instead. This grave uses 1 September 2016, the date the company itself announced and the date the last transmission stopped.

The regulator was not finished. The NBTC refused CTH's request for seven more days to file its customer relief plan, imposed a thirty-day penalty and suspended the license. On 20 October 2016 the company filed with the Central Bankruptcy Court for rehabilitation. A shareholder later complained to the Department of Special Investigation about how the shutdown had been handled.

None of this reached Turkey, where the football came through other pipes entirely and the Premier League was somebody else's rights war. Only the shape repeats. A mid-sized pay TV operator decides that exclusive football is the thing that will finally make subscribers switch, pays a number that only makes sense if almost everyone switches, and then discovers that people who will not pay for television will not pay for televised football either. Setanta learned it in Britain and Kirch learned it in Germany. CTH paid Asia's record price to learn it in Thailand.

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