Tata Sky not scared of Sun's DTH foray
DNA — September 24, 2007

Tata Sky, a joint venture between the Tata Group and Star, aims to cross eight million direct-to-home (DTH) connections by 2012, a top company official said on Monday.

It was also planning to launch in the next few months personal video recording (PVR), whereby a user can pause and play live TV, managing director and CEO Vikram Kaushik told a press conference here.

He said the company had so far invested Rs1,000 crore since its launch of the service and would be investing Rs2,000 crore more in the next three to five years.

He also said with the addition of the Sun bouquet of channels two weeks ago, Tamil Nadu has become the largest volume contributor to Tata Sky in the two weeks.

To a query on Sun TV's DTH foray, he said there was no question of Tata Sky being scared of competition. On Sun's offer of Rs75 per month DTH service, he said this was an attempt to postpone customer's decision to move to other service providers.

"But the answer lies in delivering better value to the customer," he said.

"Sun DTH would be a competitor just like the other DTH service provider, Dish TV," he added.

Tata Sky DTH, which began service with 55 channels, now offers 140 channels with packages starting at Rs200 and going upto Rs350.

Currently, it had 30,000 dealerships across 4,500 towns, which would touch 5,000 towns by the end of the year.

"The Indian pay TV market is set to explode with an estimated 165 million pay TV households by 2015," he said adding DTH technology was expected to lead this revolution.