Content area
Full Text
India will be one of the biggest markets for satellite pay-TV services throughout the next few years. Dish TV, backed by Zee Telefilms, already is seeing strong growth in this market, and Tata Sky, a joint venture between Star and Tata, launched a nationwide direct-to-home (DTH) service in India in August 2006.
The market may be huge, but Tata Sky CEO Vikram Kaushik believes it can support only three players. He detailed Tata Sky's plans to develop satellite pay-TV in India, its initial subscriber targets and the role of satellites in what is arguably one of the world's most intriguing markets for satellite pay-TV services.
Satellite News: How do you view the market opportunity for Tata Sky in India?
Kaushik: I think the opportunity is truly stupendous, and that is largely because all over the world the process of digitalization of television has been set in motion. It has been seen as one of the processes which everyone has to follow for reasons of using spectrum more efficiently. We do know that on the ground, cable and analog operations today are inefficient for the simple reason that you are not using the latest compression technologies or digitalization to optimize this scarce resource. For that reason alone, I think the opportunity is tremendous.
The second thing is that entertainment, particularly in the Indian marketplace, occupies a very promising place in peoples' lives. The macroeconomic data seems to suggest that expenditure on entertainment and going out is half of that in the developed countries. So I think there is a lot of scope for people to spend their newly acquired wealth.
Satellite News: What are the major challenges now that you have launched your service?
Kaushik: I think we are now faced with two fundamental challenges. The first challenge is a regulatory challenge. We have to be able to convince the regulators and governments in general that they need to grow beyond their fear of vertical monopolies. A lot of these regulatory restraints that have been placed on pay-TV businesses emanate from a fear of vertical monopolies and out of a fear of large foreign media conglomerates who might come and build on these vertical monopolies.
There are artificial constraints such as no exclusivity of content,...