Tata Sky the leading DTH operator has announced that it will be adding 20 new channels to its offering shortly, these will include both SD as well as HD channels. As we had reported earlier Tata Sky had been upgrading its transmission standards in a shift from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 in a phased manner. The current upgradation has affected 17,000 out of its 1 crore subscribers across India with many facing temporary loss of signals.
Tata sky performs this upgradation to switch to better standards of compression so as to make available greater capacity for carrying more number of channels. Tata currently offers 300 channels after having added 80 new channels last year and plans of adding another 20 this year. Tata sky has managed to narrow down the affected subscribers and has deployed engineers to visit their homes and realign the dish and LNB to compliment the newer standard of signals.
TataSky, a Joint Venture between Tata group and media major Star has over 10 million active connections and around 3/4 connections are on MPEG 4. The DTH operator, which has recently gone for a tariff hike is expecting the industry to add 4 million customers every year due to digitisation programme.
Harit Nagpal CEO of Tata Sky spoke to PTI saying "The industry would grow for the next 5-6 years. There is enough opportunity here as the digitisation of analogue delivery system of home cable TV is in progress and still 80 million connection are to be converted into digital mode.” On the tariff hike, he said: "Every year, we go for a price hike which is roughly 4 percent in March. Last year, it was Rs 230 and this year we have increased it to Rs 240. The company has an average revenue per user (ARPU) of Rs 250 and having a growth of over 5 percent on a year-on-year basis.
