Around 28% of the estimated 100 million pay TV households will migrate to digital pay television platforms by the year 2010, according to an Ernst & Young study.
NEW DELHI: Around 28% of the estimated 100 million pay TV households will migrate to digital pay television platforms by the year 2010, according to an Ernst & Young study on the media sector.
Farokh Balsara, national sector leader, media and entertainment, at Ernst & Young said on the sidelines of a summit organised by Assocham here on Wednesday that there would be approximately 19 million pay direct-to-home (DTH) homes in India by 2010, up from 3.5 million now.
In addition to the 3.5 million pay DTH homes, currently there are about 3 million free-to-air DTH homes on the Prasar Bharati platform.
While there are only two pay DTH platforms in the country now-Dish TV (of the Zee group) and TataSky (a joint venture between Tata Sons and Rupert Murdoch’s Star), many more are set to join the competitive space soon. The new players, with aggressive DTH plans include the Bharti group, Reliance Communications, Sun TV and Videocon.
Even as in most other countries, DTH is restricted to one or two players, India is a unique market with so many firms competing in this space.
Balsara said, India’s broadcasting market is still evolving, and therefore could accommodate five to six DTH players. When asked to compare between DTH, IPTV (internet protocol for television) and conditional access system (CAS), he pointed out that DTH may be the winner in the long run.
Although at present the DTH players are competing on pricing of the set-top boxes and that of the channel bouquet, besides the value-added services, platform owners like the managing director of TataSky, Vikram Kaushik, pointed out that exclusivity of content should be allowed on DTH.
Currently, as per the regulator’s norms, no DTH service provider is allowed to offer any exclusive content-that is, all channels have to be shared with all DTH platforms on mutually-agreed financial terms.
Meanwhile, Ajay Vidyasagar, president, Star TV, spoke about the learnings of the year at the Assocham summit.
It was a revelation, he said, that the most watched events across news channels were not political events, but related to entertainment. Some of these were Taj Mahal being voted as one of the seven wonders, wedding of Abhishek Bachchan and Aishwarya Rai, Sanjay Dutt going to jail, and India winning the 20-20 cricket tournament.
Another learning, pointed out Vidyasagar, was that regional was where action was, and this was true for movie viewing trend in Mumbai also.
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