iesy

~ the goodbye ~

Germany's cable television plant was built by the state and then broken up on the regulator's instructions, one federal state at a time, which produced a set of companies that each owned a single region and spent the following decade trying to buy each other. iesy Hessen GmbH & Co. KG, based in Darmstadt, was the Hesse piece. It was spun out of Deutsche Telekom in 1999, and on 1 July 2000 a London firm called Klesch & Company took 65 percent of it for two billion Deutsche Mark. The network it bought was supplying cable television to 1.3 million customers in Hesse.

The name took a while to settle. The company started as Hessen Kabel GmbH, took the brand name eKabel in 2000, and only after that became iesy, a lowercase coinage of the kind that was briefly compulsory for European telecoms companies that wanted to sound like the future. The logo spelled out what the company actually was in three words under the wordmark: Kabel in Hessen. What it sold started as cable television and ended as internet and telephone service over the same wire, which is the sequence every cable operator on the continent ran through in those years.

None of this touched Turkey. What the German arrangement produced was a second wire into the house that did not belong to the telephone company, and that is the thing I never had a choice about while I was buying DSL from TTNET in Ankara. The interesting part of iesy is not the service it sold. It is the order in which the German cable map got eaten, and which end of it this company was standing on.

~ the chronicle ~

~ three names in eight years ~

Kabel Deutschland tried to buy the regional networks outright in 2004 and the competition authorities stopped it. So the regions bought each other instead, and the direction of that purchase is the part worth noticing: in November 2005 iesy, with one state, took over ish, which held North Rhine-Westphalia, the most populous state in the country. The small operator swallowed the big one and the combined business sat under a holding company called Unity Media.

For about eighteen months the group kept running the two regional brands side by side, with Tele Columbus West alongside them. Then it stopped. HORIZONT reported on 18 May 2007 that the operator would replace Ish and Iesy with a single umbrella brand, quoting chief executive Parm Sandhu saying the company had pooled its capabilities and become a full-service provider, which is the sentence companies use when they mean they would like one invoice and one logo. German Wikipedia dates the merge of the three brands to 22 May 2007 and gives the same day as iesy's dissolution. A HORIZONT piece from the following month places the launch of the unified identity at the end of May.

~ the logo that lasted four weeks ~

The new brand arrived as a stylized speech bubble holding three colored dots, with a slogan from the Hamburg agency Success Identity promising that one cable made everything possible. RTL went to court. By 18 June, HORIZONT was reporting that the broadcaster had obtained a preliminary injunction because the three small colored marks looked too much like the RTL logo, and that the same agency was already building a replacement, to be shown to RTL the next day and implemented by the end of that week. The cable operator EWT was separately unhappy about the slogan, which it said was too close to its own.

Unitymedia itself lasted longer than the brands it replaced. Liberty Global announced a 3.65 billion euro takeover in 2009, then bought Kabel BW in 2011 and merged the two operators the following year. Vodafone's purchase of the result closed on 1 August 2019. The Unitymedia name was discontinued on 1 February 2020, when Unitymedia GmbH became Vodafone West GmbH. iesy's own legal successor went the same way and is now Vodafone Hessen GmbH & Co. KG. The word itself is in use again by somebody else. iesy.de forwards to iesy.com, which today serves 247 kilobytes belonging to iesy GmbH of Meinerzhagen, an embedded computing company with no connection to cable television at all.

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