Direct-to-home (DTH) service provider Dish TV India Ltd is gearing up for competition from rivals Reliance Communications and Bharti Airtel.
NEW DELHI: Direct-to-home (DTH) service provider Dish TV India Ltd is gearing up for competition from rivals Reliance Communications and Bharti Airtel, who are launching their services on the latest technological platform MPEG 4.
Dish TV and Tata Sky currently provide services on the MPEG 2 format. However, Dish TV says it is “quite confident” of meeting the competition from the new entrants as MPEG 4 and MPEG 2 offer virtually the same video and audio quality. The only difference is in the cost of set-top boxes, which is much higher for MPEG 4.
Dish TV currently offers set-top boxes for free and plans to launch its own satellite to further enhance its capacity. “MPEG 4 boxes are much more expensive and may put extra burden on the subscriber. Moreover, the MPEG 4 format is not in accordance with BIS (Bureau of Indian Standard) and the government’s regulations and, hence, is not interoperable with MPEG 2 boxes,” Jawahar Goel, managing director, Dish TV, told DNA Money.
Experts say MPEG 4 set-top boxes are 50% more expensive than set-top boxes for MPEG 2 formats.
Dish TV, which is endorsed by Bollywood actor Shahrukh Khan, said new players need to come out with a device “to make their services interoperable” to millions of boxes that are already owned by consumers.
Dish TV, which has a first-mover advantage in this business, has 3.4 million subscribers. There are around 5 million DTH subscribers in the country.
“We feel there is room for everyone. The enhanced competition will see customers getting more educated, which will lead to faster adoption of the category and everyone will enjoy a secular share,” Goel added.
As the satellite transponder costs have shot up, many DTH operators are opting for the latest compression technology MPEG 4, which allows them to squeeze in more channels in the same bandwidth capacity.
However, the Essel Group-promoted Dish TV has no plans to upgrade its format to MPEG 4 as it makes “no business sense,” especially after it launches its own satellite.
“It does not make business sense for us to upgrade to MPEG 4 at the moment. Those who don’t have enough satellite capacity are going for MPEG 4 compression technology,” Goel said.
Dish TV posted revenues of Rs 416.1 crore in the financial year ended March 31 2008.
vivek_s@dnaindia.net
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