Features: Magazine | Literary Review | Life | Metro Plus | Open Page | Education Plus | Book Review | Business | SciTech | Friday Review | Young World | Property Plus | Quest | Folio |

Enjoy your Dish... a la carte

With the DTH explosion round the corner, Sudhish Kamath explores the new options for couch potatoes

The days of the expensive buffet are over.

For couch potatoes, the blessing is round the corner. Instead of paying for all channels on the menu, as required by the cable operator, or installing a set-top box that won't work anywhere else in the country, you can just help yourself to a little dish on top of your house for your TV meal.

Just rub it a little, and the genie appears through your personalised remote: An electronic programme guide.

Like any other newspaper or magazine you subscribe to, finally, you will need to pay only for those channels that you want to watch and at a digital picture and sound quality that cable TV can only dream of providing.

Subscription Television through the Direct-to-Home platform (DTH) is all set for the Big Bang, a few weeks from now.

The first player Dish TV, will launch its Gaming and Interactive services by end of June, in addition to its Digital Video Recorder and Movie-on-Demand services.

The much-awaited Tata Sky, a joint venture of Tata and Newscorp, will begin its rollout by July. A revolution is expected, with Tata Sky planning to sell prepaid cards for subscription to transfer the power of choice to the consumer.

Doordarshan's own DTH platform that has enormous potential to tap into virgin markets in the remotest parts of the country is yet to acquire the teeth it needs to bite into huge Indian Cable and Satellite Homes' pie: a range of the popular channels and content. But it's just a matter of time.

Dish TV, with a subscriber base of over a million around the country, is adding 200 subscribers in the city everyday, despite the non-availability of the STAR channels on its platform. "The case is in court. Consumers should have the option to watch all the key channels. We hope STAR does provide us its channels sooner or later," says Sunil Khanna, CEO of Dish TV.

Making inroads

Armed with its ESPN-STAR soccer package, the DTH operator is making huge inroads into the market this World Cup season. Dish TV will soon bring its premium product, the Digital Video Recorder and Movie-on-Demand services to Chennai, after a favourable response in its test markets Delhi and Pune.

The Digital Video Recorder, priced at Rs.15,900, lets you pause live television and record programmes onto your 80 GB hard disk so that you don't ever miss a thing you wanted to watch. The Movie-on-Demand facility lets you watch the latest movies at the price less than that of a single movie ticket. "We are already breaking even on the movies. We recently screened "Kyun Ki" for something like Rs. 40. Nowhere will a producer get this big an audience with a single screening. Even if there are 10,000 people watching the movie, you can calculate the collections," Khanna explains.

Zee has a library of 2000 films for the Movie-on-Demand facility and the DTH operator is planning to increase the number of channels to 200 by end of the year. "The number of DTH homes in five years is expected to grow to 15 million," he says, dismissing any threats from the competition round the corner. "All DTH platforms will grow at the cost of analog cable operators and not eat into each other's revenue."

A Dish TV set-top box costs Rs. 2,990 for 75 channels inclusive of subscription charges for a quarter and subscribers get to choose quarterly, half-yearly and annual packages that range from Rs.107 per month for the basic tier of 75 channels to Rs.300 for over 130 channels.

While Dish TV (www.dishtvindia.com) sells its set-top boxes (Conmedia and Hundan) through a network of 10,000 dealers throughout the country, Tata Sky (www.tatasky.com) has tied up with Thomson and Humax for its boxes which will be made available in all leading consumer electronic stores and will sell channels through prepaid cards and make them as accessible as the ones you buy for your mobile phone.

"One of the key differentiators will be superior customer service, delivered through a nationwide sales and service network and 24/7 call centres," says Vikram Kaushik, CEO of Tata Sky. "In addition, Tata Sky's long innings in entertainment, broadcast and specifically DTH, is enviable. Along with the Tatas, Newscorp and Newscorp's Indian subsidiary STAR, Tata Sky is tapping into the experience pool and expertise of FOXTEL, BSkyB and Sky Italia, the leading DTH ventures of News Corporation in Australia, U.K. and Italy."

India-specific

The company has been planning the launch for over a year closely studying DTH operations around the world, while also trying to make them India-specific, given the size and diverse tastes and demographics of a market considered to be among the biggest in the world.

"Managing the individual needs of millions of subscribers requires a lot of expertise, high-end technology, and large investments. Very few companies in the world can claim to have this expertise," says Kaushik. All of Newscorp's DTH ventures around the world are successful and growing, he adds.

"Unlike the one-package-for-everyone policy of analog cable, Tata Sky plans to offer flexible packages to customers so that they can select and pay for the package of channels that they want to watch. All this is a part of Tata Sky's endeavour to transfer control into the hands of subscribers. They can decide what to watch, when to watch and how to watch their favourite television programmes," he says.

The Tata Sky chief also maintains that India is a large enough market for multiple technologies and players to co-exist. "Tata Sky will be a mass-based service. Our service will be competitively priced in the market. Since, this is an evolving industry, our final pricing and content will be decided and announced closer to the launch. Also, one of the advantages of DTH is its availability of television channels in rural and urban areas, however remote they are. We expect demand from both urban and rural India. Subscribers of our service will be those who enjoy the best of cable channels in digital quality picture and sound. In addition, we will offer some new channels and exciting interactive services."

Tata Sky will also be launching its brand of the video recorder and movie-on-demand, but not in the first phase of its launch. With the DTH set-top boxes being interoperable, you will be able to upgrade and change your operator, something that a subscriber has never ever been able to do in Chennai.

Long live the remote control. DTH is here. Enjoy your dish, a la carte!

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail