The Lippo Group, through an affiliate company, plans to officially launch a satellite-based pay television service in July under the trademark of Big TV, an executive said on Friday.

The group’s expansion in the pay television business, through affiliate company Indonesia Media Televisi (IMTV), is expected to help boost pay television subscriptions in Indonesia, where only 5 percent to 10 percent of the population have signed up. Indonesia’s television market is still dominated by free-to-air services.

IMTV signed an agreement on Friday with Mitsui & Co. Asia Pacific, part of the Japanese diversified trading company, that paves the way for Mitsui to own a 5 percent stake in IMTV. There was no transaction value revealed, but IMTV’s total paid capital is worth Rp 85 billion ($8.76 million).

“We think that the Lippo Group is doing a great job in business in Asia, so we want to be a part of that,” said Makoto Serino, a general manager at Mitsui.

“Mitsui has [a lot of] experience in IT business in many countries, and now Indonesia is one of the growing countries in the IT area, which is why we want to [invest] in this division of the Lippo Group.”

Mitsui, which bought the 5 percent stake from an existing stakeholder, is expected to bring technological support to the Indonesian company.

IMTV is 60 percent owned by Multipolar Media Prima, a company fully owned by Multipolar Technology, which in turn is a wholly owned subsidiary of Multipolar, a diversified investment holding firm of the Lippo Group. The Jakarta Globe is affiliated with the Lippo Group.

Established two years ago, IMTV launched a satellite in May last year, as part of the plan to roll out Big TV, the satellite-based pay television service that will be officially launched this July.

Big TV will compete against existing players such as Indovision, TOP TV, OkeVision, TelkomVision, Yes TV and Aora TV.

Felix Adichandra, the IMTV chief executive, said on Friday that he hoped Mitsui’s expertise in technology and global business network would prove beneficial to IMTV.

“We hope access to Japanese content should be easier too,” he added.

He said Mitsui’s stake would be limited to 5 percent for now, because Indonesian regulations limited foreign ownership in domestic media holdings to 20 percent.

Fifteen percent of IMTV is already owned by Link Net, whose majority shareholder is CVC Asia Pacific Limited, an international private equity firm.

“What would happen next is capital injection. Mitsui has said it will [provide] whatever capital injection is needed. It’s their commitment,” Felix said.

The presence of satellite-based pay television also complements Lippo’s First Media pay television service, a cable-based television and Internet provider.

Felix said Big TV was targeted at middle and lower-middle income subscribers.

“First Media is designed to serve big cities, through cable, while IMTV is directed to reach everywhere across Indonesia where cable can’t reach,” he said.

“Economic growth acceleration in eastern Indonesia, outside Java, has resulted in demand for entertainment and education that we can provide.”

Big TV aims to reach 1 million subscribers within its first year of operation. The service will offer up to 300 channels.

On Friday, First Media and IMTV signed an agreement with MP & Silva to secure the rights to broadcast English football games from the 2013 to 2016 Barclay’s Premier League seasons.

First Media, by the end of 2012, had about 291,000 subscribers, an increase of 52 percent from the 191,000 subscribers it had a year earlier.

http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/business/lippo-groups-big-tv-looking-to-mitsui-for-tech-expertise-content-2/

Indonesia has two of the most active tweeting cities in the world, according to the a recent study by France-based social media monitor Semiocast.

Jakarta topped the list, while Bandung took 6th place, according to an announcement on semiocast.com on Monday. The survey said that 10.6 billion public tweets were posted in the month of June, and that more than 2 percent of them were tweeted from Jakarta, which was duly declared “the most active Twitter city” by the website.

Tokyo ranked second, followed respectively by London, Manchester, England, New York, Bandung, Paris, Los Angeles, Chicago and Riyadh.

“This study reveals that users from Jakarta were the most active within all cities ranked by the number of posted tweets, [showing] the activity of Twitter in the country,” Semiocast said.

But in terms of the number of Twitter accounts by country, Indonesia finished fifth after the US, Brazil, Japan and Britain. The 6th through 10th places were occupied by India, Mexico, Canada, Spain and the Philippines respectively.

Indonesia boasted 29.4 million Twitter user profiles as of the end of June, only slightly lower than Britain’s 32.2 million Twitter user profiles, Semiocast said.

Semiocast said up to 517 million Twitter user profiles had been created before July 1, including more than 140 million in the US alone.

English remains the most used language on Twitter, followed by Japanese, Semiocast said, pointing out that the US is the most active Twitter country, with US-based users posting 25.8 percent of all public tweets, followed by Japan-based users who posted 10.6 percent.

http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/archive/jakarta-named-most-active-twitter-city-in-recent-study/

Irma Dinia, not her real name, considers herself a social media addict. Every morning upon waking up, she checks her Twitter timeline and Facebook newsfeed from bed, just to see if there is any mention of her name. She does the same before going to bed at night.

“I am really annoyed with that, but I can’t stop myself from doing the same thing again and again. I just feel like I need to,” Irma, a 31-year-old private employee in Central Jakarta, spoke of her dilemma.

She said she would feel a rush of excitement whenever people retweeted her, or when her status on Facebook invited a string of comments. Conversely, a muted reaction to her posts would leave her feeling down.

“That’s a thing I’m ashamed to admit, but that is how I feel,” Irma said.

Icha, a 20-year-old student at the Bandung State Polytechnic (Polban), similarly shared her problematic addiction with social media sites.

“I keep opening Twitter although there is no mentioning. That’s annoying but I can’t stop. The timeline is often boring, but I just keep checking it,” Icha told the Jakarta Globe in a phone interview from Bandung.

“I used to hurt my fingers just to reply to all those mentionings, but I kept replying to them,” she added.

Icha said the obsession had been with her since she started using a BlackBerry early last year.

“Whenever I ran out of my phone credit, I would check Twitter via my mom’s or dad’s cellphones,” she said.

Icha said in recent months her addiction to Twitter had become less intense, but only because her friends had migrated to the happening chat services WhatsApp and LINE.

“And I’ve started delaying recharging my phone credits because whenever I have them, I am tempted to do all those [social media activities].”

Although there is no study or official report yet about social media addiction in Indonesia, the potential is certainly there, with Indonesians ranking among the top users of Facebook and Twitter.

The latest data from checkfacebook.com shows Indonesia’s 47 million users sit fourth in terms of the number of Facebook users worldwide, after the United States, Brazil and India.

France-based social media monitor Semiocast last year named Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta, as the world’s most active Twitter city, taking first place among a top five that included Tokyo, London, the British city of Manchester and New York. Bandung, Indonesia’s third largest city, came in sixth place.

Some Twitter-related phenomena also owe their origins to Indonesia.

There are those “selebtwit,” or Twitter celebrities, namely people who are not public figures but manage to gain a significant following and become celebrities of a sort; “kultwit,” an Indonesian acronym for Twitter lectures, in which users tweet continuously for hours about certain issues; and Twitter wars, most prominently waged when Twitter celebrities attack each other in 140-character jabs.

A psychology professor from the University of Indonesia (UI), Hamdi Muluk, said on Thursday that social media addiction could be considered a pathological disorder requiring therapy.

“It is not a physical addiction as is the case with cigarettes or alcohol, but it can be classified as a psychological addiction. The parameter is if it is excessive or not,” said Hamdi, who heads the doctorate program at UI’s School of Psychology.

“If the time they use for social media exceeds normality and disrupts their daily activities — distracting them from work, making them forget to eat, reducing their sleeping hours and causing them to feel restless and anxious if they don’t [get their regular exposure to social media] — then it is pathological,” he explained.

Hamdi said more than four hours of daily engagement with social media could be classified as a pathological addiction.

He added that people with low self-esteem, individuals struggling with their real social lives or those with obsessive tendencies or craving attention were especially prone to social media addiction.

“And they’re usually not aware that they’re having a problem; it is people around them who will usually first take notice,” Hamdi said.

A recent report by Reuters TV highlights social media addiction as a newly recognized psychological problem. “Likes” and retweets give users a burst of the addictive neurotransmitter dopamine, but a lack of endorsements can provoke jealousy and anxiety. And it’s a lot more common than people might think, although some aren’t willing to admit it.

Reuters TV quoted consultant psychiatrist Richard Graham from NHS Tavistock and Portman Clinic in London, who said he treated around 100 social media addicts a year at the clinic, with the patients’ ages ranging from 10 to 35.

A study last year by the University of Chicago, which was presented in the US city of San Diego on Jan. 27 at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, found that social media addiction could actually be more problematic than cigarettes or alcohol.

The study, called the Everyday Temptation Study, examined and compared various desires people experience in everyday life, including a look at basic needs such as food, sleep and sex, and “modern cravings” such as smartphones and social media.

“Social media stood out as a desire that is relatively hard to control in comparison,” Wilhelm Hofmann, associate professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and a co-author of the study, said in an e-mail to the Jakarta Globe.

More than 40 percent of 205 adults from the city of Würzburg in Germany who were subjects of the study failed to resist “media desires,” including surfing the web, checking e-mails and especially social networking.

The percentage was higher than of those who failed to resist other desires, such as for cigarettes, alcohol and sex.

The study, which did not differentiate between men and women, suggests social media’s addictive nature is perhaps because of the constant availability of media.

“For sure, the long-term and health consequences of media over-consumption may be less harmful than those of other behaviors we compared it to, such as smoking or alcohol abuse,” a brief summary of the study’s findings reads.

“At the minimum, however, these activities may consume considerable portions of people’s time and distract attention from other goals and activities,” it adds.

http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/health/social-media-addiction-a-new-pathological-disorder/

elsinki, Finland. The makers of Angry Birds are launching a cartoon series this weekend, expanding further beyond its highly addictive games in a bid to expand entertainment and merchandising.

Rovio, the company behind the popular mobile app game Angry Birds, said the cartoons will feature adventures of birds that appear in its games.

Angry Birds Toons can be downloaded through on-demand services, and will also air on television channels such as FOX8 in Australia, ANTV in Indonesia, Cartoon Network in India, and MTV3 Juniori and MTV3 in Finland, it said.

Rovio has expanded into merchandising and licensing in the past few years and its colorful, round bird characters are sold as stuffed animals and appear on everything from T-shirts to soda cans.

It announced in December that it hired Hollywood executive David Maisel as executive producer of a 3D animated film planned for release in 2016.

http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/features/angry-birds-cartoons-head-for-indonesian-tv-screen/

Business expansion and increased competition among Indonesian companies are pushing demand for technological services, claims Dell, a US PC maker.

“Corporations are demanded to work faster, bigger and more responsive,” said Pieter Lydian, a managing director at Dell in Indonesia, in a meeting with journalists on Thursday.

With demand that was spurred by expansion in the economy, technology has became extremely important for companies, Pieter said. Meanwhile, technology alone is not enough, he said, citing Dell’s solution-based approach.

“People are dealing with problems that need solutions. What’s the point of having technology if it does not offer a solution?” Pieter said.

Dell’s solution and service business ranges from building and configuring corporate imaging, hardware and software integration, to service technicians that can be called for help at a moment’s notice.

Pieter declined to disclose the revenue growth in Dell’s service business in Indonesia, but he assured that the demand remained robust.

Danny Hartono, senior service business development manager at Dell, citing data from International Data Corporation, said that companies’ spending on technological services has increased about 20 percent annually over the past few years.

Despite the fact that revenue from product sales remains the biggest contributor to earnings, sales services business is crucial as it enhances the sales growth of products. In the corporate market, Peter said, Dell is “very dominant” in Indonesia, but refrained from revealing its market share.

Demand is not only coming from big corporations such as big banks in need of managing their complex online systems, but also from small to medium-sized businesses. SMEs have even more pressing demand for technological solutions because of limited human resources, the managing director said.

Meanwhile, as Dell starts to increase its exposure to the consumer market, the company will also experience increasing service demand in the consumer segment.

“Consumers now are more demanding and more aware of what they need. As consumers are getting more educated, they are more value conscious,” Pieter said.

IDC reported earlier this month that in 2012 a total of 5.2 million units of personal computers was shipped into the country. Although it shows 2 percent decline from a year earlier— as PCs compete with tablets— the IDC said that it is fairly optimistic for sales to rise in 2013 as prices become more attractive.

http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/tech/dell-ample-demand-in-indonesia-for-services/