Page 22 - AIB | The Chanel | Issue 2 2012

Although
ARPUs
and price
points are
much
lower,
expect-
ations of
customer
service
are very
high
THE CHANNEL | FOCUS
customers range from people who
travel extensively and earn large
amounts of money to others who
potentially struggle to pay for our
basic pack. Our mantra is that we
want to have a disproportionately
large share of the higher end of the
market but we absolutely want to
have our fair share of the mass
market too.
None of the DTH companies has
any exclusive channels as the
channels themselves are under a
ʹmust provideʹ provision to any
platform who wants to take that
channel. There are regulated
wholesale prices at which you can
take that channel as a platform. So
content differentiation through
pay‐per‐view, VOD, different ways
in which you package content, those
things become very important.
How big is the demand for
international channels?
If you take the big international
providers, Fox International
Channels group is one and
Discovery is another, Disney is here
with its kids channels. And what
the kids channels and the
documentary‐factual infotainment
channels have done very well is use
multiple audio tracks – that
significantly helps grow their
appeal. Research gets a little tricky
as some 80% of the TAM panel
households are cable households
and of the remaining 20% only 90%
of that is DTH.
Going forward, I think that the
international channels group have
an advantage in that they tend to own
a wider range of rights for their
programmes than some of the other
channels. This is important for us
as we have a VOD offering, we run
a catch‐up service, and as we start
to think about what we are going to
do for tablets and mobile and IP.
What about DD Direct?
The concept of Free‐to‐Air doesn’t
exist to nearly the same extent in
India as it does for example in the
UK. In terms of competition we
know DD Direct is there, but we
focus more on the other commercial
DTH platforms ‐ Airtel, DISH,
Videocon, etc. It is impossible to tell
how many boxes have been sold for
watching DD Direct.
Talk us through installation
You can call one of our call centres,
we have a network of local
distributors and they then in turn
run a network of local installers. We
can generally install in most parts
of the country within four hours.
Whatʹs important to understand is
that although ARPUs and price
points are much lower, expectations
of customer service are extremely
high. Having a widely disbursed
network of installers and
distributors is extremely important.
If your nearest recharge outlet is
10km from your home the
probability of you recharging on
time every month is going to be
lower than if your nearest recharge
outlet is 100m down the road.
Are you leading with your STB?
We do put a great deal of emphasis
on things like picture quality, audio
quality, the robustness of the set
top box, the quality of the EPG ‐
effectively the whole user
experience. We are the only DTH
platform offering VOD at the
moment, we certainly lead the
market in terms of pay‐per‐view buys
versus the other DTH platforms.
The Tata brand is enormously
well respected in India and that has
significantly helped in terms of
brand recognition and trust. For
those people who have travelled
abroad the Sky brand also has
resonance. One of the attributes
that we work hard at is being seen
as technically innovative. And I
think it is very important to be both
a brand that serves high end
customers but also works for
people who are aspirational for
example in terms of ʹat some point I
want an HD PVRʹ. We think of
ourselves of being in the business
of delivering entertainment and
whilst there are differences
between India and other markets,
we look around, we see what other
people do, how they use mobile
technology for example.
Is the second screen a reality?
Are people watching a lot of video
on phones and tablets – hard to tell
exactly. Most peopleʹs mobile
phones are used on a prepaid
model so as a consequence of that
handsets are not subsidised. In the
office, in the street, itʹs more an
Android market than an Apple
”
“
22 | ISSUE 2 2012 | THE CHANNEL