Es’hailSat’s Sales Director, Mohamed Al Sayed
The Qatar Satellite Company (Es’hailSat), which provides services to over 180 TV channels across the Mena region, including Al Jazeera and BeIn Sports, is considering a number of options for further expansion, which includes venturing into the growing over-the-top (OTT) media services market, an Es’hailSat official has said recently.
Es’hailSat’s satellites, the Es’hail-1 and Es’hail-2 are currently transmitting high quality, premium DTH television content across the Mena region, Es’hailSat’s Sales Director, Mohamed Al Sayed has said.
The company launched its new teleport control station in Doha this year to provide customers with secure and independent satellite transmission. The high-tech teleport will also provide back-up studios for TV channels and serve as a disaster recovery facility for customers.
Last year, Es’hailSat launched its fully-owned Satellite Es’hail-2, which was the second from its planned fleet of satellites and was designed to complement the Es’hail-1, which was a joint venture with France-based Eutelsat.
“We’re studying a number of options for expansion. But the new trend that we can see a future in is the OTT services. These are growing very fast, and we might think about these services also in the future. The company is thinking in different ways. Either we need to build a new satellite, a new requirement, or see the global market and try to, for example, acquire startup companies or new technologies,” Al Sayed said while talking to The Peninsula on the sidelines of the Qatar Entrepreneurship Conference which concluded recently.
Globally, the market penetration of OTT services has hit 38 percent, according to the OTT Video Trends Report. The research conducted by cloud-based video production and distribution platform Grabyo, added that OTT platforms are a more popular choice for video viewing than pay-TV services in every territory.
The report also highlighted that OTT streaming platform Netflix has already hit 54 percent of the global market penetration, which rises to an average of 61 percent within predominantly English-speaking countries. Global OTT services market which was valued at $26bn in 2017 is also estimated to reach $92bn by 2026 at a CAGR of 17.1 percent.
Es’hailSat, said to be the newest satellite operator in the Mena region, seeks to constantly evolve to offer the highest technologies in the market, said Al Sayed. He added: “Right now, in the global satellite market, there’s high-throughput satellite technology that offers very high speed satellite internet services. We’re also studying this technology. For now, we have enough capacity. But in the future, we need to look into different services, and not just for TV channels and internet services. We need to look on the services that can help the companies, especially the telecommunications, oil and gas, and other customers to provide them with very high quality services”.
