MTG brings Virgin exec into Viasat

Scandinavian broadcast giant Modern Times Group (MTG) has brought in a new chief operating officer for its Viasat pay TV business in emerging markets and expanded its channel carriage in Russia.

Aleks Habdank will start work on May 7, having been director of digital entertainment products at Virgin Media in the UK since 2009, with responsibilities for its TiVo service, linear TV operations, VoD, online and multi-screen services.

His departure comes after the European Commission cleared Liberty Global’s £15.8bn (US$24.6bn) takeover of Virgin Media last month.

Prior to Virgin, he was general manager of Chello On Demand and has also worked at cable company NTL and broadcaster Zone Vision Group.

Based in London, Habdank will manage the pay TV channel operations for Viasat Broadcasting in Central and Eastern Europe as well as developing its emerging markets pay TV business in the Baltics, Ukraine and Russia.

Viasat’s emerging market operation sells packages on its satellite platforms in the Baltics and Ukraine and on joint venture satellite platform Raduga in Russia. The company also distributes 35 channels via third-party pay TV networks in 31 countries across CEE, Africa and the US.

He will report to Irina Gofman, CEO of MTG’s Russian, CIS and emerging markets pay TV operations.

Habdank is the latest senior exec to be hired by MTG following the appointment of Google’s Rikard Steiber as exec VP and chief digital officer and BBC Worldwide’s Richard Beeston as VP of finance in January.

In related news, Viasat Broadcasting is making its Viasat Premium HD package of channels available to Mobile TeleSystems’ IPTV and digital cable subscribers in Russia from this month.

It follows a similar carriage expansion on to the Rostelecom Interactive platform in December.

The package includes movie channels TV1000 Premium HD and TV1000 Megahit HD, comedy channel TV1000 Comedy HD and two documentary channels, Viasat History HD and Viasat Nature HD.