Gene Musselman
Analyst · Morgan Stanley
Yeah I can approach it first maybe from 30,000 foot level and then try to come down in a little bit more detail. As in '06 I mean if I would look back and review what we’ve done Monday morning quarter back and I would say that '06 was a very successful year in the Netherlands and that we’ve created an install base of more than 0.5 million digital subscribers using as you said a combination of push and pull strategies. Although very heavily reliant on the push strategy and towards the end of the year the exception straight at the door we saw a decline and also an erosion of the economics, although, we continued with that push strategy throughout the end of the year. I think that strategy was successful, however, and if we were to look at rolling out The Netherlands, again, I probably wouldn't recommend changing it. In '07, on the other hand, we’re going to modify that strategy to some extent and focus more on the pull strategy and building value. Last year, we were trying to build a base in which we could scale the operations and make acquisition of the contents. [It’s value needed to be affordable], et cetera. And also, this year we'll have the digital drivers to roll out in The Netherlands that we did not last year. That is DVR, HDTV, and VOD, all of which were in the process of putting into the market, as I speak. Our next launch is in Cablecom and we will re-launch them starting April 1. They have 135,000 digital subscribers at the present and we are just in the process of installing the D4A platform there, which will allow us then to use the same [PE] and leverage our down in that market. You may not be aware of it, but we have close 1 million digital subscribers now, and some of our M&A activity last year, we actually acquired digital platforms, for example, in the Czech Republic, the Karneval acquisition in December. They have a digital platform and we will continue to use it and roll out throughout the UPC Czech areas this year. In Ireland, they have a digital platform and we are just in the process of moving from the NTL platform in the UK and consolidating operations in Dublin and we’ll be rolling out the D4A platform along with DVR there in the next couple of months. In Romania, through the acquisition we acquired a digital platform, which we will continue to roll out in Bucharest for the balance of the year. And we are also in the process now of developing business cases for Hungary, Poland, and Austria. Although, in Austria, we’ve deployed and we’re looking at taking out the legacy platform and putting in the D4A, but we will be making decisions with respect to those three markets in the coming months.