Tata Sky sees 165mn pay TV households

With at least two more direct-to-home (DTH) services to commence in the near future, Tata Sky Ltd hopes to make good of the growing competition.

The joint venture between Tata Group and STAR is expecting the Pay TV households to be around 165 million by 2015.

Quoting an MPA report, chief marketing officer Vikram Mehra said, "The Pay TV households are expected to be around 165 million by 2015. We expect to have a major share in this, given our growth rate."

Claiming to be the first DTH operator in the world to cross 1 million connections mark in one year, Mehra added that the company is expecting to soon cross the 8 million mark by 2012.

After spending around Rs 1,000 crore last year, Tata Sky has now set aside an investment of another Rs 2,000 crore to raise up its subscribers base. The company finds a huge scope of tapping the market since only 70 million households in the country own TV sets, which is supposed to grow upto 200 million households.

Among its new services, Tata Sky will be offering 15-20 more channels much of which will be regional channels to be offered as part of its recent settlement with Sun Network. Mehra declined to comment on possibilities of the cost of the settlement being shifted to the subscribers.

Tata Sky will also soon launch more interactive services like personal video recorder (PVR) where the viewer can pause the live programmes to watch later.

Moreover, the company is in talks with broadcasters for offering some of the international channels as well. Presently, the DTH player offers around 120-odd channels across the country.