From analogue to digital : The story of Indian Cable and DTH industry in 2014

The Indian cable and DTH industry has seen a lot of action in 2014 and as the industry is transitioning from being analogue to digital, there is ambiguity and confusion. And as the industry evolves, let us look at some key milestones it achieved in the year 2014.

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India today stands as the 3rd largest TV market globally next only to China and US with around 155 million TV households. These are again shared amongst cable operators and DTH players. India has around 780 channels, which were brought down from 840+ due to criticism that the country has been too liberal in granting licences to TV channels.

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India is in the midst of the digitisation of cable television and has completed phase I and II albeit with hiccups. Around 30 million households have been covered under the initial phases. Deadlines for phase III and IV which were slated to finish by this year have been revised and now phase III implementations needs to be completed by the end of 2015 and that of phase IV by the end of 2016. This has brought relief to the MSOs who are grappling with issues like additional investments in infrastructure and availability and deployment of Set Top Boxes (STBs) for phase III and IV. But the revised deadlines have left the broadcasters unhappy. These broadcasters have been looking to reap benefits of digitisation for quite some time now.

There were some significant breakthroughs achieved by the DTH players, this includes simultaneous launch of a regional language movie on the same day as it was released in theatres and launch of a mobile app which made TV viewing available on-the-go through smart devices. These kinds of developments and adoption of technology is a positive sign of the industry progressing in the right direction and offering choices to the customers.