10
NEWS & VIEWS
May-June 2017
Keeping the Asian diaspora in
Europe connected to home
Launched in August 2016, boobles.tv
is a service of bubbles media,
which specialises in TV products for
international target groups. Specifically, boobles.tv offers
Asian expatriates located across Europe entertainment and
news content from their home countries. APB prompts Arnold
Kulbatzki, founding partner and CEO of bubbles Media, who
has more than 20 years’ professional experience as a manager
in the media and telecommunications sector, for more details.
boobles.tv is a relatively new
service launched in August last
year, and is offered on both
satellite and OTT. Can you tell
us more about boobles.tv: what
is your key strategy and how do
you marry it across both your
satellite and OTT platforms?
Arnold Kulbatzki: Our goal is to
help expats located across Europe
stay in touch with home through
top-quality entertainment and
news from their home country. For
decades, diaspora populations in
Europe have been able to access
programming from their native
countries in numerous ways. But,
these language-based channel
bouquet services usually were not
professionally managed or attrac-
tively packaged. Also, they were
frequently associated with piracy.
With bobbles.tv we aim to en-
able people from across Asia, Latin
America and Africa who’ve chosen
to live and work in Europe — a
population estimated at around 15
million — to be able to enjoy the
best content from home in a really
convenient and cost-effective way.
Choice and usability were key
too. bobbles.tv is available in
Europe via the Astra satellite at
19.2 degrees East and it can also
be enjoyed via over-the-top (OTT)
for online viewing, via connected
TV or a range of mobile devices.
Subscribing is easy and afford-
able — depending on the chosen
package, bobbles.tv monthly prices
start from just €6.95 (US$7.47)
online and €14.95 on satellite.
Convenience for our customers
is really important to us: in regard
to universal reach we paired the
bobbles.tv OTT streaming service
with direct-to-home (DTH) satel-
lite. Certainly in Europe, if you
want to truly engage with people
located right across the region,
pan-European satellite is really the
only way to go.
We realised that combining
OTT with DTH would yield the
best of both worlds and enable
In terms of technology, which
are the ones that interest you
most right now, and do you plan
to utilise these technologies to
allow bobbles.tv to reach out to
more audiences?
Kulbatzki: We are already pretty
advanced in terms of reach. So what
is new? In April, we launched our
new HEVC/H.265 set-top box for
satellite reception and our new OTT
box for streaming on the TV set.
Chromecast is a standard feature.
We are keeping a close eye on the
smart TV market but usage doesn’t
look that promising so far. In this
niche market, we will wait and see. launch, Indian packages.
We instinctively knew that peo-
ple who relocate to another coun-
try don’t want to lose touch with
home, or to lose their links to its
culture. This view was validated by
people in my own circle of friends
who wished they could easily watch
their favourite shows and movies
in their mother tongue. The logic
follows that Europeans located
elsewhere in the world would be
similarly attracted to an economic
and easy-to-use TV offering.
Believe me, going global is al-
ways intriguing, and assuming we
could make the commercial model
work, it would be great for us to ex-
plore this in the future. But right now
we have plenty of work to do with
our current roadmap of launches
for audiences based in Europe.
You are now primarily serving
the Asian diaspora in Europe. Is
the European diaspora in Asia a
potential target for the company
as well, and do you also have any
specific plans to enter into Asia?
Kulbatzki: We’ve been over-
whelmed by the positive feedback
from subscribers enthusiastic about
our Chinese, Indonesian, Vietnam-
ese and, following our most recent In today’s digital world, where
consumers have so many choic-
es, the way content is being con-
sumed is evolving, and arguably
beginning to move away from
traditional linear platforms. How
do you see this trend developing
in the next two to three years,
and what do you think will be
the key to capture and retain
eyeballs?
us to build our business based on
reach right across the continent,
including areas where there is no
or limited broadband.
boobles.tv distributes channels from around the globe, delivering popular
programming to Indian, Chinese, Indonesian and Vietnamese expat communities
in Europe.
❝ I don’t see us entering an all-on-demand
world, or the much debated concept of TV-as-
an-app. Rather, I think consumers’ new elevated
expectations will lead content and service
providers to be smarter, and leverage the best
aspects of linear, as well as on-demand. ❞
— Arnold Kulbatzki,
Founding Partner and CEO, bubbles Media
Kulbatzki: My professional career
in the TV business has always been
driven by takin