Over the course of last eight months, the Indian telecom sector has witnessed insane changes such as 1GB data price coming down to as low as $0.33. Special thanks to Reliance Jio here because the company offered free LTE services for six months, which helped it gain 100 million subscribers in no time, and also forced incumbent telecom operators to offer more at cheaper rates.
However, Jio is not only trying to make its presence felt in the telecom sector but is also betting big on the digital content services. If the rumours are believed to be true, Reliance Jio Infocomm’s (RJIL) next services could be Jio DTH and Jio GigaFiber. In the last few months, the Jio DTH service has been in the news.
Recently, clear images of the Jio DTH set-top box have surfaced online, followed by a complete setup and hands-on video by a Reliance Industries employee, which showed that the service does not come with any fancy features. Going by the leaked images and video, we can confirm that the STB does not come with any fancy features as the Airtel Internet TV.
The Jio STB is not an IPTV based one. It just serves as any other set-top box available in the market. Also, it doesn’t come bundled with online content services such as Netflix, YouTube, etc., which is a letdown.
In the YouTube video (which can be watched from here), the user claimed that Jio is testing the service for now and it has only 150 satellite channels which also includes some HD channels. The Jio STB also comes with RJ45 port along with two USB ports – one on the front and the other on the back. Users can connect the STB to their TV via HDMI port.
It also comes with a feature called ‘Catch Up TV,’ which was also rumoured to be in early stages. Essentially, the Catch-Up feature allows you to track the shows that were broadcasted in the past one week and that’s a handy feature. Also, you can schedule recordings not to miss your favourite TV shows or movies. However, he claims that you require a minimum of 64GB pen drive or hard disk to record the shows, which is somewhat annoying.
Furthermore, the STB comes with a parental control mode, which means that you can lock a particular channel not to allow your children to watch the content. Also, the user claims that Jio is not allowing to mark favourite channels, which is a necessary feature. But, Jio did not include the feature on its STB.
Nevertheless, Jio's upcoming STB doesn’t have any path breaking features as everyone expected. Airtel recently launched the Airtel Internet TV, which has way too many features in it and going by the video, the Jio DTH service doesn’t look like a threat to Airtel Internet TV by any means. And the service is rumoured to go official by Diwali this year.
