Optical fibre manufacturer Aksh Optifibre plans to close funding worth $50-80 million to finance its IPTV (internet protocol television) rollout shortly.
Will cover 20 cities through its BSNL alliance
MUMBAI: Optical fibre manufacturer Aksh Optifibre plans to close funding worth $50-80 million to finance its IPTV (internet protocol television) rollout shortly, a senior company official said on Thursday. It is also looking to raise additional money to finance optical fibre capacity expansion.
Kailash Chaudhary, managing director, Aksh Optifibre, said the company has raised $40 million to roll out IPTV services in Mumbai and Delhi with MTNL. “We have also tied up with BSNL to roll out IPTV in 20 cities. This requires an investment of $50-80 million over 12-18 months. We will close the modalities shortly… it would be a mix of debt and equity.”
While Aksh has rolled out services in Mumbai and Delhi, all the 20 BSNL network cities are expected to go live over the next three months.
Chaudhary welcomed the government’s decision to issue a policy framework for IPTV, which would make it easier for companies to source content. “Till date, pricing (by broadcasters) was arbitrary and IPTV was getting the wrong side of the stick. The broadcasters were neither considering us as CAS nor DTH and treated us like cable service providers, whereas we are completely different,” he said.
Current guidelines on down-linking will allow broadcasters to provide content to IPTV service providers. Chaudhary said some channels who were not sharing feed with IPTV players would now be made to do so as the current guidelines recognise IPTV as a platform similar to DTH or CAS.
Aksh sees its IPTV customer base swelling from 10,000 now to 0.5 million over the next three years. Besides subscription charges (which range from Rs 150-200 per subscriber per month) for the content, the company sees a greater revenue opportunity from “pull advertising” for which it has already begun testing and expects a launch in two months.
Aksh is also a leading optical fibre cable manufacturer. Owing to strong demand from both domestic and overseas markets, its capacities are completely sold out. Chaudhary said the company would shortly announce a substantial capacity-expansion plan.
Aksh is looking to increase its revenues from services like IPTV and VoIP and, by the turn of the decade, expects 60-70% of revenues and 80% of operating profits to come from these services.
g_rabin@dnaindia.net
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