Advanced Television

Mediaset VoD for Vodafone, Sky Italia goes OTT

April 3, 2014

From Branislav Pekic in Rome

Italian broadcasting group Mediaset has confirmed it will offer its Infinity streaming VoD service to Vodafone Italia customers.

Customers of the mobile operator will be able to watch content on various types of devices (smartphone, tablet, Smart TV, game console and PC), free of charge, for the first three or four months (three months for pre-paid, four months for post-paid, tablet, ADSL and Fibre customers). Subsequently, the monthly subscription will be €9.99. A dedicated app to access the Infinity service from smartphones will be launched on April 14th.

Infinity provides access to more than 5,000 movies in HD – in the original language or with subtitles – in addition to a large selection of cartoons. Movies are available a few months after their cinema release and can be watched for 48 hours, even by those who do not have an active subscription.

Vodafone Italia currently covers 1000 municipalities with HSPA+ technology, 200 cities with 4G, and 45 cities with fibre. The operator plans to double the investment in fixed and mobile networks and services, to €3.6 billion over the next two years. The aim is to achieve 95 per cent population coverage with HSPA+, 90 per cent with 4G and to bring fibre to 7 million households, or 30 per cent of the population.

Meanwhile, Sky Italia has launched Sky Online, a new OTT service mainly designed for those who are not yet Sky Italia subscribers, or cannot install a satellite dish.

Two options are available: the monthly ‘Cinema’ or “TV Series” tickets, which are renewed every month, and the ‘Event’ ticket (football matches, sports week-ends and tournaments). The ‘Cinema’ ticket costs €19.90 and provides unlimited access to eight Sky Cinema channels and a VoD library, while the ‘TV Series’ ticket, also for €9.90, includes three Fox channels and over 30 TV series. Finally, the ‘Event’ ticket costs €5 per event (€8-10 in the case of major football matches and €12 for an entire weekend of Formula 1).

For existing customers, all content on Sky Online is already included in the subscription, at no additional cost.

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