Reaching For The Sky

The company has grown from strength to strength culminating last year in the launch of Sky Pacific, its direct-to-home satellite service that not only reaches the entire Fiji group but also blankets the region from the Cook Islands in the east to New Caledonia in the west.

Fiji TV-which is listed on the South Pacific Stock Exchange in Suva-announced a net profit of F$4.45 million (US$2.58 million) for the year ending June 30, 2005. Dividend payout for the financial year was F$1.85 million (US$1.07 million) or 18 cents per share.

The Kontiki Fund, which holds Fiji TV shares, is upbeat about its investment, saying in its third quarter 2005 report: "The core Fiji free-to-air and terrestrial subscription TV services are thriving. The recently acquired Papua New Guinea (PNG) EMTV free-to-air business is benefiting from both a resurgent economy and FTV's much tighter approach to costs, and closer attention to the customer base than EMTV experienced under its previous owners. Meanwhile the pan-Pacific satellite service launched last year offers the same little understood earnings growth potential as the terrestrial pay-TV business did when we first invested in FTV, but this time with the support of a much stronger base to fund it to break even."

It cost Fiji TV F$6.5 million (US$3.7 million) and took two years of hard work, failed deals, testing and pushed-back deadlines before Sky Pacific finally went live in late 2005.

Ken Clark

While it may seem an ambitious project, Fiji TV's chief executive officer Ken Clark says it was first envisaged while the company's flagship free-to-air channel-Fiji One-was being set up in 1994.

"The threshold for delivering Sky Pacific was established when Fiji One reached 85 per cent of the people of Fiji," Clark tells Pacific Magazine.

"This was reached when we established a transmitter at Dogowale on the Coral Coast, and another at Vunisea on Kadavu in late 2003."

Not long after launching on home-ground, Sky Pacific opened in Tonga and the original 12 channels have increased to 16, including BBC World, CNN, a Chinese language station CCTV, MTV - "a very comprehensive menu of strong television programming," according to Clark.

Initially, taxpayer-funding was contemplated-Fiji TV is majority owned by Yasana Holdings, a government backed company-but the company decided to take the plunge itself.

"Our options were to build one transmitter at a time over a very long period or to bite the bigger financial and technical bullet and go the satellite route."

Now Clark says, the company is "aggressively pursuing" setting up all across the west and north Pacific in countries such as Kiribati, Nauru, Vanuatu and territories well south of Fiji. "We perceive our market to be MMP - Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia."

This pursuit is possible through satellite technology. The service is delivered via "C Band" satellite transponders, the reach of which Clark says, is considerable even for receive dishes no larger than 1.5 metres.

But in the early stages of securing the technology, the company ran into obstacles. A deal with a Dutch company to provide a Ku band satellite service fell through and Fiji TV sued the company in the Netherlands. "Through a complicated legal and negotiation process (Fiji TV) changed the technical plan. The result is a more technically robust service with a much bigger service area (footprint)," says Clark.

"This is a digital television service which will be presentable for a long time. Eventually the older analogue services will have to be retired. How long will it be until we have to do that? Many years, but (it is) better to be in a digital environment now and be able to operate for a very long time."

At first Fiji TV was wary of how the audience would respond to the new service, which costs F$55 (US$32) a month, because subscribers were already attached to the three Sky terrestrial pay channels. He was surprised at what happened.

"A strange phenomenon is taking place - at the same time as Sky Pacific subscriptions are growing very rapidly, our Sky Fiji (analogue) numbers remain solid as well. We had felt they would drop off as people converted to Sky Pacific - instead - we are signing up new subscribers to Sky Fiji as well."

The 2004/05 financial year also saw Fiji Television revitalize its creative services unit, In-house Production, sign an exclusive agreement with Tonga Broadcasting Corporation to provide and distribute international rugby feeds and other television programs in Tonga, and expand Pacific Services, which buys and sells programs for Fiji TV to other Pacific Island countries. As a group, Fiji TV and its subsidiary, Media Niugini Limited recorded a net profit of F$4.53 million.

The sky, it seems, is the limit for Fiji TV.