Serbia national TV frequency tender
April 24, 2018
From Branislav Pekic in Rome
Serbia’s Regulatory Authority for Electronic Media (REM) has announced a tender for one national TV licence. The announcement was made after a special session of REM held last week, but no additional details were provided.
The national frequency was previously used by TV Avala, which ceased broadcasting in November 2012. A tender was subsequently organised in 2013 and, despite interest by TV Nova and TV Kopernikus, the regulator decided to cancel the procedure.
Serbia has 7 national FTA channels, broadcast via DVB-T2, of which three are from public broadcaster Radio Televizija Srbije (RTS1, RTS2 and RTS3).
The other four are commercial channels – two belong to Greece’s Antenna Group (Prva and O2TV), while Happy TV and Pink are owned by local businessmen.
Local daily Danas reported that Serbian businessman Bogoljub Karic, who used to have a national TV channel in the 90s called BK TV, is potentially interested in the TV licence.
There has also been interest by two foreign investment funds for the acquisition of Pink Media Group which, besides Pink in Serbia, also owns national TV channels in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Pink BiH) and Montenegro (Pink M), as well as over 40 pay-TV channels distributed via cable, satellite and IPTV both in Serbia and the former Yugoslavia region.
For its part, daily Informer said that the funds offered around €500 million for Pink Media Group, but in the end a deal was reached to sell only Pink BiH and Pink M to US investment fund KKR.