New direction home

DTH player Dish TV expands its channel bouquet but even that may not be enough.

One hundred and fifty "" that's the number of channels now available to India's 1.1 million Dish TV subscribers.

The Zee group's direct-to-home (DTH) venture had 135 channels till recently, and has now added cable & satellite (C&S) attractions like Sony Entertainment Television, Max, Discovery, Ten Sports, Travel & Living, MTV, Sab, Pix, AXN, NDTV India, NDTV 24x7, NDTV Profit, Nick, Animal Planet and Animax.

One Alliance, the distribution arm of Sony Entertainment Television (SET) and Discovery Network, has agreed to provide Dish TV a feed for that bouquet of channels "" in return for a share of revenue.

"This deal would help us reach out to metros and cities where we were lagging due to non-availability of popular channels like Sony," notes Sunil Khanna, CEO, Dish TV, which is confident of raising prices a bit (the "basic plan" could just go up by Rs 38 to Rs 180 per month) on the strength of the deal.

Like any DTH offering, Dish TV basically sells on the power of "disintermediation": no cable guy, just a small dish at your window. Direct reception.

The idea is to win switchovers from households dissatisfied with their cable service "" on the promise of higher quality transmission and wider choice of channels.

But people at large have been disappointed that it does not have everything C&S services have. Even after the One Alliance deal, it has a glaring gap on its menu.

The leader of the TV entertainment market, Star India, has shown no interest in hopping aboard, operated as Dish TV is by its fiercest one-time rival (the 1990s' Star-Zee split is the stuff of TV legend).

Observers reckon Star might sign up only if Dish TV multiplies viewership. As of now, it's a lightweight "" of little consequence to advertisers looking to reach a market of 100 million plus TV households (and for focused top-end reach, there's print).

For the record, Khanna claims to be getting some 100,000 subscribers per month. But can it get anywhere close to the big league? DishTV is hopeful of growing its largely metropolitan base at an annual rate of 50 per cent.

"The tide will turn in our favour... if a broadcaster doesn't have its channels on our network, then that's its loss, not ours," says a stoic Khanna.

The state broadcaster Doordarshan, meanwhile, has claimed its own DTH success in DD Direct, which offers only free-to-air channels and claims one million subscribers.

Tata Sky is also waiting to get into the DTH business, but with content so crucial, it is Star that holds the trump card "" as its entry can prove to be the real game changer.

As expected, the market scramble now is for effective programming, with most technical parameters reaching a state of near-parity.

Of course, technical innovations still offer some scope. Dish TV, for example, will launch English movies on demand, a service India has missed.

"We expect growth in the top segment of the market with more such interactive launches," says Khanna. But the market driver would still remain what it was: the ability to involve the viewer intimately with what's on that television screen.

Disintermediation is hard to pronounce, and even harder to carry out.