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DTH: bigger players ready to take a plunge

CHENNAI: Direct-To-Home or DTH has become a household name and every consumer wants to own this next-gen set-top box. Players such as Dish TV, Tata Sky, Sun Direct and others are already vying with each other to capture their market share. Bigger players like Reliance Big TV and Bharti Airtel are just readying to make a big splash in this space.

New entrants (Reliance Big TV, Sun Direct and Bharti Airtel) are entering the DTH space with high quality (moving picture experts group) MPEG-4 technology. MPEG-4 helps an operator to broadcast more channels in a compressed form without losing quality. However, Dish TV, which is using MPEG-2, plans to continue the same technology for some more time.

“The technology might be advantageous from the operator’s angle. Compressed data files transmitted through satellite using MPEG-4, a high definition platform, will have better quality. However, the service providers will have the same cost of bandwidth for using any technology. On the customer front, the quality will be better but the price of the set-top boxes will be higher,” according to Salil Kapoor, Chief Operating Officer, Dish TV India Limited.

For a consumer, the monthly subscription cost for DTH and (conditional assess system) CAS on cable were more or less the same. He said, of late, DTH service providers have been introducing value-added services such as movie on demand, multi audio feed, gaming, electronic programme guide and digital video recorder.

However, Mr. Kapoor felt that cable operators were fragmented and it would take the DTH operators some more time to capture the maximum share. Nearly 80 million households were connected with cable and satellite systems and this was growing at 30 per cent annually. Today, only six million households were having DTH connections and this was expected to grow exponentially.

The rural market, he said, was expected to grow faster than the urban. There was nearly 30-35 per cent growth in the rural market for DTH.

At present, each operator adopted MDU (multiple dwelling units) method under which, a single antenna was used for many connections. However, the concept of sharing of antenna with other operators has not yet caught up.

The entertainment taxes paid by the DTH industry were between 6 per cent and 30 per cent and Mr. Kapoor wanted it to be abolished.

He said Dish TV projected a turnover of Rs. 900 crore for the year ending March 2009 and would have a subscriber base of five million.

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