Now Home Entertainment : the next booming sector

You would have always wished to get rid of Monopoly of these Cablewalllahs..... who every month rake in lot of money despite poor transmission quality and Customer Service...
Now it seems this home entertainment sector is going to get revolutionised... like telecom in India. Yes, many private players are planning a foray, with cutting edge technology, quality customer services, and off course a price battle is expected.
Neverthless, people are going to get benefitted out of it. A very well knitted article on Rediff giving clues about developments in this sector....

"A cranked up direct-to-home platform and digitised cable content means you'll get the finest content, sound and picture quality as home entertainment goes retail.

You love them, and you hate them, and now you can do without them. Which gives you the choice to sit back and look at their offerings - which aren't too pretty - to decide whether you want to live with your cablewallah, or start a dalliance with any of a slew of new services, all of it guaranteed to give you hundreds of channels, 24x7, with clear transmission quality, pay-per-view films and programmes, and a whole set of choices hitherto unknown to the Indian television viewer.

Better than cable? Apparently so. Even better: you won't have to deal with your grouchy cablewallah and his lousy customer service because he's changing his set-up too. Already, select cable operators have begun to shift from the analog format (which is what you watch) to the digital in a bid to protect their turf.

But the big news is the direct to home (DTH) format to leverage its superior technology and woo away discerning customers from cable. DTH isn't new but it's the biggest thing that's happening to television viewing.

And on Tuesday, television viewers will get another taste of independence as Tata-Sky (a joint venture between Tata and Star TV) hits the markets with its DTH platform, ending the two-year monopoly of Subhash Chandra's Dish TV (which has 1.3 million subscribers in the private DTH platform space, so far restricted to non-metros).

At an introductory price of Rs 2,999 as upfront charges, and Rs 200 a month for 55 channels, Tata-Sky has already brought the battle straight into the cable operators' court.

Says Vikram Kaushik, managing director of the new company, "We are already cheaper than what customers pay monthly, which is an average of Rs 220 for cable. We will be disappointed if we don't become the leader in DTH in the first year. What we will offer customers is service, which they have never enjoyed before."

Not that Dish TV is willing to relinquish its first-mover advantage. So far, it had concentrated its spread in regions where cable was not available, but is now correcting that to make a grab for the larger metro and city markets.

Says Dish TV boss Jawahar Goel, "We estimate that 60 per cent of the incremental subscriber base will come from urban markets which were only 15 per cent of our business till now. But now we have both the Star and Sony bouquets on our platform (which have been made available only a week or two ago), so it makes sense to tap the metros."

Tata-Sky has already tied up with 15,000 apartments and housing societies in Mumbai and around Delhi by installing a single dish antenna (instead of separate antennas for every connection, which can be cumbersome in a condominium).

But that's a move that has met with stiff opposition from cable operators who are crying hoarse and have already complained to the regulator (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, or TRAI) that the move is anti-competitive as it deprives them entry into these societies. (Tata-Sky ripostes that it is for each housing society to make its choice, and individual flat-owners can say no, so how is it monopolistic?)

The cable operators haven't simply rolled over to allow DTH access to their traditional turf. Big cable operators like IN Cable or Hathway have begun investments to move from analog to digital, and are putting up a fibre optic cable backbone in the major metros to offer value-adds like broadband (and perhaps also telephony) at a bundled pricing.

Their expectation is that at least 30 per cent of the existing cable customers (around 2 million) will choose digital cable (with a set top box) in the metros once conditional access system (CAS) gets implemented. Come Diwali then, IN Cable will launch pay TV with both Hindi and English movies on demand."

Read Freedom from the cablewallah!