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We Want to Become a Big Internet Player
April 22, 2008, Hospodarske Noviny
Nova is on a mission to capture the Internet. Petr Dvořák, CEO of local TV broadcaster No.1, declared 2008 as the “year of the Internet” already last year, and the actions taken by the TV station since the beginning of the year confirm that.
Being really serious about entering the virtual space, the TV station is going to launch its own Internet portal within a few days.
The idea of getting a portion of the three billion crowns estimated to flow through the Internet advertising market this year is hard to resist.
Nova has already started broadcasting its adverts in the gaming sections of the Internet portals Seznam.cz and Atlas.cz. A factor that helps is an agreement with Geewa, an Internet games supplier. These two partners alone will enable Nova to broadcast as many as twenty million adverts a month. Geewa games are played by 100 thousand people every day and Atlas is going to broadcast the adverts in its new version of ICQ.
Nova is also planning to place its advertising in the Internet music shop i-legalne.cz that has about three quarters of the downloadable music market.
* HN: What exactly is Nova's new Internet project about? Will it be an entertainment portal or a news one?
We are preparing a news portal that is going to be launched very soon. It is supposed to be the first TV news portal on the Czech Internet.
* HN: What is the technical solution all about? Will the portal be available through the nova. cz website?
We opened a new digital news centre last year to be able to process information and video for TV broadcasting as well as for placing a lot of such information on the Internet. The idea is to operate an interactive Internet news portal built exclusively by means of our own resources and available on an independent address, i.e., not on the nova.cz. Obviously, the portal will include a large quantity of news, as well as entertainment information and services.
* HN: Are you going to build a new team of editors or are you planning to use the existing TV one?
We have set up a completely independent editing team to work in the same room with the TV one. The new editing team includes regional editors. The two teams cooperate very closely to release original and exclusive news very quickly.
* HN: What will be the approximate cost of building this portal?
We are prepared to invest tens of millions of crowns. Including technology, the figure is one order higher, though.
* HN: What are your ambitions with the new portal? How many users are you expecting and when is the portal going to be launched?
The Internet is our priority this year. Our objective is to reinforce the role of the country's most popular TV program. We want to develop our business in a new area this year, i.e., on the Internet, and wish to become one of the key players in this market segment.
For additional information, please contact:
Romana Tomasova
Director of Corporate Communications
Central European Media Enterprises
+44 (0)20 7430 5357
romana.tomasova@cme-net.com
