Last week news emerged that SES would be losing its DTH transmissions to Scandinavia’s Nordic Entertainment Group’s (NENT) Viasat. Viasat will merge its operations to Telenor’s THOR satellite and move away from SES 5 degrees East.  Telenor and NENT will own 50 per cent each of the new business.

SES Video’s CEO Ferdinand Kayser, speaking at the SES Q3 results presentation said the Nordic region was one of the very few on the planet where consolidation had not taken place. “So, it was a matter of time and soon or later, this was to happen.”

“We for the time being, our understanding is that, and we are of course discussions with the colleagues from [Sweden’s NENT]. There will be no impact on our revenues during the next two and three years. And then depending on how the migration will be executed, of course, there will be an impact, a negative impact after this period,” continued Kayser.

However, all is not lost as far as the SES 5 degrees East position is concerned. Kayser told analysts that there were many free-to-air broadcasters on its 5 degrees East satellites.

“I should mention is that NENT being the successor of MTG, which has been historically our customer on this orbital position, MTG reorganised part of the activities already many years ago by selling the Ukrainian activities to Ukrainian operator, and this continue to be on 5 East. By selling the Baltic operations to a Baltic operator and this continue to be on 5 East. We, of course, have to first develop the 5 East neighbourhood. And of course, we are doing this with the remaining customers we have, and we will continue to have on this orbital position,” Kayser added.

Other posts by Chris Forrester:

1. Optimism under threat at SES
2. Rivada visits Terran Orbital’s manufacturing HQ
3. Avanti wins spectrum debt obligation case
4. SpaceX breaks records for re-use launchers
5. IRIS2 already in trouble?
6. Intelsat contemplates next steps
7. SpaceX: 2.7m customers and $180bn value
8. Boeing, Virgin Galactic in court battle
9. Jupiter-3 a changemaker

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