Russia’s leading WiMax provider Scartel, working under the Yota brand, announced last week the launch of Yota Play, an video on demand (VOD) service accessible from Samsung and LG TV sets, Samsung’s blu-ray players and home entertainment systems, as well as from regular computers with an Internet connection.
Yota Play offers approximately 2,000 movies from Walt Disney Company, Warner Bros., Sony Pictures, and NBC Universal, totaling some 10,000 hours of video content. Currently the content is offered on a pay-per-view basis (99 rubles, or $3.57 per movie). Subscription plans will be introduced later. Scartel – whose investment in the project is projected to reach $15 million by the end of 2012 – will receive some 17% of the service subscription fee, a company representative told Russian business daily Vedomosti.
Owners of Internet-connected Samsung and LG TV sets can manually install on their devices a special widget to access Yota Play. LG plans to pre-install the widget on its Smart TV series in the near future. The accompanying software also allows users to choose the video content recommended by their Facebook friends. Scartel also plans to add interaction with VKontakte, the largest Russian-language social network, and Twitter.
Samsung has already sold 300,000 Internet-connected TV sets in Russia and expects to grow this figure to 800,000 by the end of this year.
In a similar move last March, leading Russian mobile operator MTS made the paid video library of its subsidiary Omlet.ru accessible from LG’s Smart TV television sets. In addition, MTS recently signed cooperation agreements with several other major producers of TV sets, including Panasonic, Philips, and Samsung, to deliver content to their TV sets from Omlet.ru.
