Telepiù

» see telepiu.it as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The Italian parliament approved the Mammì law on 6 August 1990, which finally wrote down what private television in Italy was allowed to be. Three days later TELE+1 went on the air. The shareholders were Leo Kirch with 45 percent and Vittorio Cecchi Gori with 35, and the remaining slice included 10 percent held by Silvio Berlusconi, which tells you roughly everything about who was allowed to build television in Italy at that moment. TELE+2 for sport and TELE+3 for culture followed on 16 October.

All three started out free, because a pay channel with nothing on it has nobody to charge. The business began on 1 June 1991, when TELE+1 started transmitting encrypted in Irdeto and the first thing behind the scrambling was Blade Runner. From that evening Italian households had to decide whether to rent a decoder, and a country that had spent the 1980s drowning in free commercial television was asked to start paying for the channel without advertising breaks.

This never reached me. It was an Italian-language platform on an Italian satellite footprint, sold through Italian dealers. The nearest it ever came to Turkey was as a signal passing overhead toward somebody else's dish. It earns a grave anyway, because Telepiù is where the European pay-TV business worked out most of its habits.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ bianco and nero ~

The platform kept rebuilding itself. Digital satellite arrived on 3 January 1996 as DStv, became Telepiù Satellite on 1 January 1997, and on 30 August that year the whole channel lineup was renamed: TELE+1 and TELE+2 became TELE+ Bianco and TELE+ Nero, with TELE+ Grigio following the next day on the D+ platform. The terrestrial service, the original thing, went dark on 31 December 1997. In August 2001 D+ was renamed again to TELE+ Digitale.

The ownership moved just as often. Cecchi Gori sold out in 1993. In August 1996 Johann Rupert sold a 45 percent holding to Vivendi, and Kirch sold his stake to the same buyer in July 1997, which left Vivendi on 90 percent and Mediaset on 10. Mediaset's slice went to Vivendi in 1998, and in 1999 two percent was handed to Rai. A French conglomerate finished the 1990s owning 98 percent of Italian pay television, which is worth holding in mind when reading about the politics of what happened next.

~ the football ~

Serie A is why any of this worked. In 1993 Telepiù and Lega Calcio agreed to put league football behind the decoder, with a Sunday evening match at 20:30 held back for subscribers. Italian football had been free to watch and played all at once on a Sunday afternoon. The deal started pulling that apart into separate kickoffs, each one owned by whoever had paid for it.

The subscriber numbers show how volatile that trade was even at the end. Telepiù finished 2001 with 1,376,000 subscribers, lost 76,000 of them over the first half of 2002, then added 313,000 between June and September and closed the year at 1,754,000. Up 27.5 percent in a year, on a platform its owner was already trying to sell.

~ 31 july 2003 ~

Italy had two pay platforms and neither could pay for itself. On 2 October 2002 News Corporation agreed terms with Vivendi: 470 million euros in cash plus 423 million of assumed debt, a price that Screen Daily reported had fallen by roughly a third from the 1.5 billion being discussed at the start of that summer. The plan was published with the deal. Telepiù would be merged with Stream, roughly 550 million euros would be spent on the combination, and the result would be called Sky Italia. The European Commission cleared it in the spring of 2003.

On 31 July 2003 Sky Italia launched with an estimated 2.2 million subscribers, and Telepiù stopped existing. The Italian record says it flowed into Sky Italia S.r.l., which is the polite legal way of saying the entity survived and the name did not. Stream went the same way on the same day. Two platforms that had spent five years bidding each other into the ground were replaced together by a third brand that had no Italian history at all.

telepiu.it does not resolve to anything now. The channels that had been Bianco and Nero turned into Sky Sport and Sky Cinema, and the decoders in Italian living rooms were swapped out for new ones. Serie A has been sold off match by match to whoever is bidding ever since, and that arrangement has outlived every brand involved in setting it up.

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