Indosat is definitely a strong company. Like others, it's share price will go up and down but it's a solid company and has the backing of Ooredoo. At the moment, it's share price is snot doing too well and they certainly need to do something to boost it. I agree with you that their share price will most likely reflect the effect of a new product like iStream, if they manage to launch it soon.
The issue here is twofold.
On one hand, regardless of how brilliant their management can be, Indosat is still a huge company with its fair share of bureaucracy. If they started the deal with TV2U in say November and launched by June, or even July, I would consider this a major achievement compared with the time projects usually take to execute. Just look at their website and some of their services, prehistoric! They don't lack talent or money, but things tend to drag along.
The other issue is that Indosat is facing very serious competition from Telkom and XL Axiata in the mobile telephony segment. The industry analysts see Indosat as the number 3 player and that should worry them. Telkom is a big company and XL Axiata is backed by Axiata (which is basically like Ooredoo with 350 million subscribers).
In the OTT segment, Telkomsel, the Telkom subsidiary, has its own MAXstream product (with World Cup streaming). XL Axiata has its own Xstream product, which is not very sophisticated but offers unlimited YouTube, Netflix and iflix among others. They look also in damage control mode. Their ad basically says this:
"
Xtream Smartphone 4G collaboration from XL, YouTube and Evercoss provides the best online streaming experience, with all the benefits that can be enjoyed 24 hours a year, unlimited YouTube access, 12GB Internet quota bonus, watch selected movies with iflix at no cost to subscribe and call & Unlimited SMS to all XL. Starting June 1, 2018, also enjoy unlimited quotas to watch movies on Netflix and iflix."
https://www.xl.co.id/xtream-smartphone-4g-unlimited-streaming-YouTube
Regardless of what TV2U does and the status of things, Indosat has to react rapidly to this or it will lose customers. That is why iStream (yes, another stream) is important to them. I don't have numbers to back this up, but if the World Cup is a must have now and Indosat doesn't have a solution, I would guess a certain number of subscribers will move to Telkom, and maybe some already have (which would explain, at least partially, the dip in share price). Filling gaps with unlimited YouTube on IM3 can limit the damage but won't stop it completely.
It now depends on who will win that standoff, the bureaucracy or whatever is stopping them from launching a new app, even if that app is as bad as Ooredoo TV, or the business people that are trying to contain the damage and put them back on the map as a serious player with iStream (i.e. TV2U). That's why I said yesterday that I am looking at Indosat now not at TV2U.
Time will tell!
Cheers
