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Andrew Bonwick
Vice President of Product Development at Relm Insurance
Madhav Sheth
CEO of Ai+ Smartphone
Varun Kashyap & Sridevi Reddy
Co-Founders, Zithara.ai
Transforming Indian Offline Retail and Customer Engagement Using AI
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) introduced the new tariff regime earlier this year and it went into effect to bring some reeling changes in the DTH and broadcasting industry. One of the effects of the new Trai tariff regime was that it increased the monthly bills of the cable TV and the DTH subscribers. However, now it seems that the Trai tariff regime might have had even far-reaching effects. What we mean by that is subscribers of DTH and cable TV services are giving up on their connections, and it is likely that the reason lies in the increased monthly bills which have been triggered by the new Trai tariff regime. The major slump came in the April-June quarter, where the DTH operators witnessed a 25% decline in their connections.
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20 Million Subscribers and More Bail on DTH Connections
Trai publishes the performance indicator report every quarter, which brings to light the situation of the DTH, broadcasting and the telecom industry. In this report, it was noted that the industry as a whole had a 72.44 million strong user base in the January-March quarter, but come June, when the second quarter of the year ended, the total subscriber base of the DTH industry stood only at 54.26 million. It is also crucial to note that the implementation of the new Trai tariff regime happened on April 1, which explains why a lot of subscribers could have given up on their DTH or cable TV connections.
The loss in the subscribers for the DTH operators also had to do with the problems faced by the companies and the subscribers during the transition period of the new Trai tariff regime. It was during this period that DTH operators were plagued by lack of awareness on the consumers’ part, ill-trained staff and the ‘best-fit packages’ which seemed forced on the consumers since those were not the channels which the subscribers had opted reports The Hindu Businessline. On the other hand, at its very essence, the Trai tariff regime boasted that the subscribers would only have to pay for what they watch and nothing else. But, in the situation which followed right after the implementation of the new tariff regime, there were a lot of unintended consequences.
