DTH players to limit number of new channels

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After the satellite infrastructure provider ISRO advised prospective DTH players to look overseas for their Ku-band frequency resources as domestic availability is running out, existing DTH players have decided to limit the number of new channels by introducing a carriage fee.

Private DTH players such as Subhash Chandra-promoted Dish TV and Tata Sky, the joint venture between Rupert Murdoch’s Star and Tatas, have already started following public broadcaster DD Direct’s example and putting in place a carriage fee on new channels. According to sources, Dish TV and Tata Sky charge as much as Rs 4 crore per channel per year while DD Direct charges Rs 25 lakhs. The carriage fee for DD Direct was brought down from Rs 1 crore to Rs 25 lakhs after the new chief executive officer of Prasar Bharti Baljit Singh Lalli took charge.

“The Government of India needs Ku-band spectrum for other equally important services such as VSAT, DSNG (digital satellite news gathering), Internet, tele-medicine, tele-education, village resource centres and village telephony. These national services will require to be only on INSAT as they cannot be put on foreign satellites,” SB Iyer, ISRO’s director (contracts management), said.

At present, DD Direct is the market leader with 7 million subscribers followed by Dish TV with more than 2 million subscribers and Tata Sky with more than 1 million subscribers.

The country’s channel space is expected to take a jump in volume this year after the ministry of information and broadcasting (looking at its huge backlog) released a notification allowing cable operators to carry channels that applied on or before 11 May 2006 and are still awaiting approval. At the end of last year there were more than 400 channels broadcasting in India.

So far, seven DTH players have been granted licences, four of whom, including South India based Sun TV, are already in service. DTH currently has the bulk of India’s Ku bandwidth - 57 of the 88 Ku-band transponders on Indian satellites and some leased capacity are dedicated to it. Dish TV is the only DTH provider that does not use Indian transponders instead opting for space aboard Dutch satellite NSS6.