With four out of 10 existing cable consumers opting for a DTH box, the two phases of digitisation have proved beneficial for the six-player private DTH industry, suggests the latest government data. This is significant because the newfound subscriber-base is evenly distributed between a handful of national level DTH players compared to hundreds of local and regional operators as the digitisation makes inroads into the Indian heartland.
As per the recent digitisation data, DTH firms have also emerged as the leaders in a dozen out of the 38 cities under phase-2 of digitisation, picking up higher share of consumers compared to those opting for digital cable services. For example, DTH companies have captured more subscribers in four out of nine cities in Maharashtra compared to their cable counterparts. Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu is the only city to have achieved a 100% DTH penetration in the second phase of digitisation, the data said.
In Pune, the number of DTH connections stood at a little over 400,000 compared to digital cable connections of 2,13,000. Similarly in Thane, DTH companies acquired around 2.33 lakh subscribers, compared to 1.6 lakh digital cable subscribers.
Ahmedabad, Srinagar, Ranchi and Meerut are the other such cities where DTH connections exceeds the digital cable connection.
DTH connections are also head-to-head with cable subscriber base in another half dozen cities. But all this competition has come at a cost of around R2,800 crore with DTH players investing R1,500 crore.
In the second phase of digitisation, which ended on March 31, the requirement was to seed 16 million digital set-top-boxes (STBs) across the 38 towns. As per the data for March 23, around 11.5 million STBs have been seeded. Also, 33 out of 38 towns will no longer receive analogue cable signals.
Combining the two phases ? first phase covered four metros ? the total requirement for digital STBs stand around 24 million of which over 20 million STBs have already been installed. Of this, close to 8 million boxes belong to the DTH operators, while the rest is with cable operators.
In phase 1, the DTH firms managed to acquire nearly 3 million subscribers in the four metros led by Mumbai and Delhi. Similarly, in phase 2, the DTH companies have so far acquired 4.5 million subscribers. Experts said on a pan-India level too, every second new subscriber to satellite-based cable channels is based one of the six DTH platforms ? Dish TV, Tata Sky, Sun Direct, Reliance Big TV, Airtel Digital TV and Videocon D2H.