Romania's telecom firm RCD&RDS continues investments in documentary tv channels with Digi Animal World

Romanian telecom company RCS & RDS has continued its investment in the media, after launching two documentary channels, on top of its existing sports, films and news channels. The company received the green light from the Romanian audiovisual watchdog CNA to launch another documentary channel, Digi Animal World, which will start broadcasting between November 15 and December 1 on the company's cable and satellite channels.

RCS & RDS launched its first two documentary channels, DigiWorld and DigiLife, almost a month ago. This third channel is part of the company's aim to build its own documentary channels package, which compete with channels such as Discovery and National Geographic, and which already have a stable audience, as they are broadcast to all of RCS & RDS's cable clients. The investment in the new documentary channel was of EUR 262,000 for 2012 and will be of EUR 250,000 yearly until 2016, according to RCS & RDS' file submitted to the audiovisual watchdog. So far the company broadcasts productions from companies such as BBC, ORF, ZDF, but it plans to run its own productions in the future too, according to Mediafax newswire. The company hopes to see profit from the three tv channels in around two years. “The profit is hard to estimate, because these are our own channels and the revenues are not direct, but taken from the cable subscription payments. Obviously, some of it will be allotted to this business line. Without advertising, the time to recover the investment is a bit longer. And we have taken into account, when launching this channel, the no advertising policy on all of our documentary channels,” said Bogdan Chiritoiu, the project manager for the new channel. RCS&RDS also owns Digi 24 HD news channel, the Digi Film channels, and the Digi Sports Channels. It is also a minority shareholder in Music Channel, H!T Music Channel and UTV. editor@romania-insider.com