The Hindu : Business : Reliance Big rolls out DTH services

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Wednesday, Aug 20, 2008
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Business

Reliance Big rolls out DTH services

Special Correspondent

The service will be offered on the MPEG4 DTH platform

Will be available in over one lakh outlets across 6,500 towns in the country
At launch, it will be available at Rs. 1,490, including a 3-month complimentary subscription

- PHOTO: PAUL NORONHA

EXCITEMENT: (from left) Sanjay Behl, Group Head-Brand and Marketing, Reliance Communications, Mahesh Prasad, President-Application Services Group, and Arun Kapoor, CEO, Reliance, BIG TV, at the launch of Reliance BIG TV in Mumbai on Tuesday.

MUMBAI: Reliance Big TV, a wholly owned subsidiary of Reliance Communications, on Tuesday launched its fully digital home entertainment service on the latest MPEG4 Direct-to-Home (DTH) platform. Initially, Big will offer over 200 channels with digital quality picture and sound. The DTH service would be available in over one lakh outlets across 6,500 towns.

At the launch, the service would be available starting at Rs. 1,490, including a three-month complimentary subscription. It also offers multiple price points and packages suiting the needs of customer segments.

Addressing the media here, Arun Kapoor, CEO, Reliance Big TV, said, “The home entertainment service market in spite of serving close to 120 million TV households for decades has still not delivered the quality, choice and service experience leading to customer delight.” The other DTH players in the fray are: Tata Sky, Dish TV, Sun Direct and DD Direct.

“There are only six million pay TV DTH homes and this will grow ten times to 60 million by 2012. The market is likely to grow to 17-18 million in a year and we plan to have a 40 per cent share of this market at the end of 12 months,” he added. The company has set up a call centre capacity capable of handling over 50,000 calls daily in 11 Indian languages, including English, across two locations to enable speedy response to customer queries. It has a staff capable of installing over 15,000 connections daily within 48-72 hours.

According to Sanjay Behl, Group Head (Brand and Marketing), Reliance Communications, “ We will also be offering several innovative and unique features in our services over the next few months. Other players offer their services using the MPEG2 platform, but we will do so on the advanced MPEG4 platform. We will be adding some more transponders in the next few months and can offer up to 300-350 channels by the first quarter next year. We will also offer 8-10 HD (high definition) channels by the year-end.”

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