Explaining why it is important that United Media and Nova VT hosted and were part of the first international jury for the 50th International Emmy Awards, Victoriya Boklag, United Group's CEO and Vice President of Marketing and Media, said that partnering with the network of the biggest professionals in the media in the world will lead to new ideas, new opportunities for partnerships and new co-production opportunities.

Since you are a CEO of a leading telecoms and media company in this part of the world and a member of the Academy of Television, Arts and Sciences, why is it significant to host the international Emmy judging for the first time in the region?

Boklag: Good question. When I got the invitation to become a member of the Academy, I think that was last year, I had a conversation with the people from the Academy and I realized that they don’t have a big network of professionals in our region, in Southeast Europe. Considering that United Group and United Media operate in eight countries in Southeast Europe and have big media operations in pretty much all of these countries, they were getting a big exposure to a good pool of talent, of professionals in the creative content and I can only praise our teams for doing a great job.

Media is a very important part of United Group, of our business, and by partnering with the network of the biggest professionals in the media in the world, and by hosting this event as well, we hope to really get new ideas, new opportunities for partnerships, new opportunities for co-production, and of course to show the world our content and try to compete with it.

United Group is both in the telecoms and media industry. Why? How do you see that these industries interconnect?

Boklag: If you look at the world 20,30 years ago, there was not that much connecting telecoms and the media world. We were receiving television through the air, we were reading newspapers, listening to the radio, but now if you look at telecoms and the media, they are actually super interconnected. If you look at our networks, they are now the biggest providers of media. It’s not satellite any more, it’s not air, it’s not terrestrial, it’s the Internet. As a group, we are investing a lot in networks, actually all the telcos in the world are. We are investing in fixed networks, we are building now fiber in Croatia. In Greece we just made a huge announcement about a €2 billion investment. We are also building fiber in Bulgaria. And why? Because the consumption of video through the Internet is growing exponentially and we believe that this is the right place to be, including also of course the mobile and 5G. As we are not just Internet service providers, we want to put the content and the technology inside. For us it is important to have both and we think that they are both important and sustainable businesses for the United Group.

You said you operate in eights markets in Southeast Europe. What are the local specifics of your media in telco companies?

Boklag: Telco is basically a machine. You need to build a factory. The strategy of the United Group was always to build state-of-the-art networks, both in fixed and mobile, because most of the media, the traditional media, the channels, the self-made content is now consumed through the Internet. So, we build very uniform plans, we are using the self-proprietary EON platform that we created within the United Group and it’s very uniform and state-of-the-art and has to work as a machine. Procedures are the same, IT is the same, technology is the same and we are striving really to provide the best experience in the market.

The media is a completely different story. They are very local, so that’s why Greeks or Bulgarians do not watch the same content and do not value the same content as let’s say Serbs or Croats or Bosnians. That’s why these businesses are complementary. Telco is very robust and uniform and media is very local.