Entertain is more than just television

With 2 million customers already, Telekom is the market leader in the German IPTV market thanks to Entertain and also one of Europe's biggest providers.

“Taking off into the future”
Increasing digitization and ever faster Internet speeds are transforming television viewing habits – and the television market. “Tomorrow’s television is multifunctional, networked and interactive,” says Niek Jan van Damme, Member of Deutsche Telekom’s Board of Management responsible for Germany. “And Entertain gives our customers the chance to take off into the future now.” With the changeover from the high-speed network to the All-IP network infrastructure, Telekom makes the benefits of Entertain available to as many people as possible. Since September 2011, 75 percent of German households have also had access to Entertain TV programs by satellite. By the end of 2012, Telekom gained 300,000 customers for Entertain per satellite.

Flexibility and interactivity
Catch-up TV, program pause, setting up a personal soccer conference call or programming your hard disk recorder from your smartphone while you are on the road – Entertain offers flexibility and interactivity. In addition, there are over 160 TV channels (45 of them in HD quality), an online video library with over 20,000 films (of which 3,000 are HD), a TV archive and various interactive applications available to viewers. The Recommend function is a unique feature in the German TV landscape: Viewers rate programs and then receive tips telling them about programs that match their preferences. It also leads the way in terms of picture quality: With high-definition (HD) TV or 3D channels, Entertain also sets new standards in this area.

Interactive television
Linking to the TelekomCloud also makes it possible to view your own content on your TV. If you have uploaded private photos or videos to Telekom’s Media Center, you can not only retrieve them on your PC or smartphone, you can also use Entertain to watch them on your TV and even use the Share function to share them this way with others. The innovative and interactive features such as the Media Center, the personal Bundesliga conference and the Program Manager, with which recordings can be easily programmed from anywhere, are popular with customers: This is another reason why the readers of the trade magazine connect selected Telekom as the best IPTV provider in 2011. This tip-top performance relies on Telekom’s modern broadband networks that offer speeds of up to 50 Mbit/s.

Zapping 2.0
The remote-control app enables Entertain customers to conveniently control their media receiver with their smartphones (iOS or Android), via their home WLAN network. The app is a full-fledged replacement for conventional hand-held remote controls. It has innovative voice-control functionality and enables gesture-based operation of Entertain media receivers. With voice control, menu items or channels can be called up without time-consuming navigation or channel hopping. Rapid navigation back and forwards in the menu using shortcuts and the convenient text entry with a full keyboard are additional practical advantages.

Networking with the TelekomCloud
Private vacation photos or videos can be played back on your TV screen with a soundtrack consisting of individually saved music tracks thanks to the links to the TelekomCloud. Telekom also enables users to access selected online services such as e-mail, weather reports and sports news. The Smart TV functions are rounded off with easy access to social media. For example, to track which are the favorite programs of your Facebook friends.

International success story
Deutsche Telekom is continually expanding its IPTV offering and has successfully marketed it abroad too. The proof: Compared with the previous year, the number of IPTV customers in Telekom’s European markets rose by an average of 20 percent in 2012. Telekom had the highest numbers of customers in the fourth quarter of 2012 in the following countries: Germany (2 million viewers), Croatia (333,000 viewers) and Hungary (312,000 viewers).