| The Rs 2,500-crore venture will be rolled out in 300 locations through 10,000 dealers on Wednesday. "Customer service is going to be the only differentiator in this business," Ishaat Hussain, the company's chairman, told Business Standard. |
| Thus, as STAR lives its DTH dream after lobbying with the government for 10 years, the operations boast of a field force of 3,000, which will be complemented by a 24x7 call centre manned by multi-lingual customer service associates. |
| In an attempt to replicate the success of the mobile phone strategy, Tata-Sky will sell pre-paid recharge vouchers for its service through neighbourhood retail outlets. |
| This will allow consumers to watch multiple channels at the same time, including multiple news segments "" top stories, current news, headlines and features "" of specific news channels on one screen. |
| The service, offering 55 channels, including news, sports, entertainment, regional and kid channels, will have an introductory monthly subscription rate of Rs 200. The total cost of the acquisition, including the hardware (a set-top box and antenna), will be Rs 3,999. |
| Dish TV, Zee group's DTH service that went on air three years ago, comes with an initial installation cost of Rs 3,990, with customised monthly packages ranging from Rs 60 to Rs 300. It offers 140 audio and video channels. |
| "We aim to rope in a million subscribers in the first year of operations," said Vikram Kaushik, managing director & chief executive officer, Tata Sky. |
| The DTH market in the country is expected to get more players like Sun TV and the Anil Ambani group. At present with 3.25 million subscribers, there is DTH penetration into roughly 5 per cent of the 61 million cable & satellite homes. |
| While PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) predicts the base to touch 10 million households by 2010, other industry estimates peg it at 15 million by 2012. |
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