Dish TV plans to expand, put in Rs 350 cr

The Essel group-promoted Dish TV is bracing for competition with plans to launch a slew of interactive services in news, music, sports and gaming portals.

This comes at a time when it is set to lose its status as the only private direct-to-home (DTH) broadcaster in the country to Tata Sky.

"We would be investing about Rs 350 crore in the next couple of years to ramp up our subscriber base. We are positioning our product as the future of Indian entertainment," said Sunil Khanna, chief executive officer, Dish TV.

The Rs 50 crore Dish TV currently provides 140 channels and logs onto 1.25 million households, adding 1,00,000 subscribers each month. While PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PWC) predicts the DTH base to swell to 10 million households by 2010, other industry estimates peg it to 15 million by 2012.

The company has embarked on an aggressive marketing drive as well. "By March 2007, our subscriber base would be 2.4 million and in the next 3 to 4 years, we could be adding 1.5 million subscribers every year," projects Khanna.

The marketing campaign covering 15 cities, including Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, Pune, Ahmedabad and Lucknow, would conclude by mid-August. Dish has tied up with HCL to promote and distribute its connections.

It has sourced technology from the US-based 'Open TV' "� for $100 million over 5 years "� which would enable it to roll out interactive content in a week.

This content, as part of the value-added services (VAS), is being seen by the company as a major revenue driver, multiplying its revenues tenfold by 2012.

While the gaming portal, 'Playjam', would provide the gaming option to DTH households, viewers would also be able to sort their programme schedule with an 'Electronic Programme Guide'.

Interactive news and sports content would enable viewers to choose among the news segments, the camera angles in a match, audio feed in regional languages and highlights.

The feature, Movies-On-Demand, has been enabled through a recent tie-up with Buena Vista International Television - Asia Pacific.

Though Dish TV would be the first to introduce VAS, others like Tata Sky, Sun TV and Anil Dhirubhai Ambani DTH Ventures, are sure to follow suit as competition intensifies, stated a media analyst.

"The interactive programming has been in the works for long. However, we have put in place a strategy for our marketing and sales effort. We have also customised our price packages, which range from Rs 60 to Rs 300 per month," added Khanna.