Bharti Airtel to launch IPTV, DTH services

NEW DELHI, INDIA: Bharti Airtel, India’s leading telecom company, is in a high state of preparedness to launch DTH and IPTV services. According to the company, it will be launching IPTV services this year.

“We have been conducting IPTV trials in a thousand households in Gurgaon and our strategy is to deliberately go slow, rolling out in the NCR region first in a phased manner and then targeting the other top six cities in the country,” said Atul Bindal, president, Airtel Telemedia Services.

“A trial launch of the DTH services has also been done amongst our employees and the feedback has been very good. We have 9,23,472 retail outlets across India as of end-June through which we sell prepaid, post-paid, and value-added service offerings and we are looking at leveraging this network for our DTH service,” he added.

The two services will have differential pricing. The rates offered by Airtel for its DTH service will be similar to those of existing DTH operators. On the other hand, IPTV strategy is to target the top seven cities in the country making a triple play (voice, data and video). IPTV will be targeted at top-end users and customers outside this ambit will be the targeted for DTH.

For both IPTV and DTH, Airtel has partnered with a number of leaders in the respective segments. To prepare to rollout DTH service, the company has sourced the best-in-breed technology based on MPEG 4, which is a generation ahead of existing offerings in satellite technology.

Moreover, the company has set up a state-of-the-art infrastructure near Gurgaon for the purpose of uplinking and broadcast.

For IPTV, Airtel had made strategic investments like upgrading the Ethernet and bringing in Carrier Ethernet. They would deliver the IPTV service through a backbone of Carrier Ethernet network and last mile delivery on copper using ADSL2+ technology.

“Our aim will be to acquire a dominant share of the new DTH subscriber growth of 5 million expected next year and for IPTV, we will target the top 6-7 cities in the country and would be looking at catering to the top end customers who can enjoy the benefits of triple play,” said Atul.

Though there are many players like Tata Sky, Dish TV, Sun Direct, etc, which are already present in the DTH space, it is only recently that the government had initiated the process of digital delivery through mandatory CAS implementation in 54 cities. This is expected to vastly open up the TV-viewing market, which is today at 72 million city and suburban homes.

Bharti Airtel expects that the Indian DTH industry will be an exciting space with an expected rapid growth of subscriber base in the next 12 months.

“We will be the only teleco who can provide customers a one knock at the door experience with one single bill for voice, data, broadband as well as DTH services, thereby making a difference to the consumer’s experience”, according to Bindal.