Tata Sky to add spice in its bouquet

Tata Sky, the emerging company in the DTH business in India, is set to add culinary delights in the bouquet of its entertainment channels. It will soon launch "Active Cooking" in partnership with NDTV to share gourmet tips with its viewers. Talking to Business Standard the chief marketing officer of Tata Sky, Vikram Mehra, said it would be a 24-hour channel where one would be able to view a recipe of choice, from an entire range of Indian or exotic food-items.

Mehra added that after the settlement with Sun TV, Tata Sky became the only DTH operator in India to offer 140 channels. He added that their market share picked up drastically after the synergy with Sun TV.

He said new channels like Bindas by UTV, NDTV Goodlife, BBC Entertainment and CBeebies helped them to reach out to the younger viewers.

"With a network of 4,500 dealers, we are present in almost every nook and cranny of the country. Tata Sky has been doing very well in the north-east of India as it offered programmes in local languages in almost virgin market of the seven states."

According to Mehra, the company targets to install 8 million connections by 2012 at an investment of Rs 3,000 crore.

Mehra said the DTH company was interacting with the heads of kindergartens across India to inform them about the usefulness of Tata Sky Whiz Kids' Collections. "Although we got a tremendous response in the first year, there is still room for reaching out more kids between 3 year and 7 years through schools to understand the English language and other concepts in a fun way."

He shared the possibility of coming out with one more kids' channels for children in their teens. "We have our own production team at Bangalore and education panels at various locations to produce programmes for Whizkid," he said.

Tata Sky has its uplink centre at Gurgaon and three high-end call centres at Hyderabad, Mohali and Pune.