The action comes as part of Private's aggressive efforts to expand into new media platforms in Europe, and comes on the heels of the company’s announcement of its new pay channel for several Latin American countries.
“We are delighted with being able to feature our content on Neuf Cegetel’s platform, which with 750,000 subscribers has a 30 percent market share of the French IPTV market,” Private COO Peter Cohen said.
“With this launch we have taken another step forward in our aggressive IPTV rollout in the dynamic European IPTV/VOD market, and now have our content accessible to more than 90 percent of French IPTV subscribers.
“France, with its population of 62 million people, is currently the overwhelmingly dominant and most rapidly growing IPTV market in Europe, and consequently we expect this development to have a very positive impact on our business going forward,” Cohen added.
According to market research firm Multimedia Research Group, global IPTV subscribers are expected to increase from 13.5 million to 72.6 million by 2011. European viewers make up the bulk of IPTV subscribers, with projected growth of 30.4 million users by 2011.
In France, Neuf TV offers more than 200 TV channels and has a library of more than 5,000 VOD/VSOD titles featuring a variety of mainstream content. The partnership with Private will offer viewers access to hundreds of the company’s adult titles, including new releases and blockbusters.
