Dish TV, one of the largest Direct-to-Home (DTH) service providers in the country, has witnessed a massive fall in revenues in Dec 2022 quarter. The telco's revenues during Dec 2021 quarter were 710.67 crores. However, a year later, in Dec 2022 quarter, the revenues were Rs 552.09 crore only. Dish TV reported a profit of Rs 80.21 crore in the Dec 2021 quarter, while during Dec 2022 quarter, the telco reported a consolidated net loss of Rs 2.85 crore. This was mainly due to a decline in revenues and the promotion of its OTT (over-the-top) platform Watcho.
“The promotion of the OTT aggregation platform launched during the period had an impact on the EBITDA margin for the quarter which came at 47.4 per cent. Net loss for the period was Rs 2.8 crore,” said Dish TV.
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To compete with the offerings of Airtel Digital TV and Tata Play in the OTT space, Dish TV is also increasing its focus on the in-house OTT platform called Watcho. The DTH company is likely going to push the OTT offerings further ahead in the coming quarters. Dish TV is also offering bundled OTT service with the Watcho platform.
There are different tiers of subscription for Watcho that we will not go into detail about right now. Dish TV is hopeful that it will see a recovery in rural and urban consumer spending in the future. The DTH industry has been continuously losing out on customers.
All the DTH operators are looking to attract new users and retain old ones by offering OTT bundled service. However, it would take a lot of resources for the DTH companies to market the OTT platform to customers, and also, there are other non-DTH companies that are offering bundled OTT services to consumers. Thus, the competition will be tough for the DTH companies to navigate through.
