CHENNAI: Dish TV India Ltd, the world’s largest single-country DTH company, said on Thursday that it is aiming to expand its retail footprint and customer base across the South Indian market in view of a rapid shift from analogue to digital television services in the semi-urban and rural markets of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh.
Dish TV, which holds about 30 per cent market share and 7,500 retail touchpoints across the four South Indian states, said it aims to acquire a three-fold growth in market share and revenue, and reach 10,000 retail outlets by the end of the financial year 2018-2019.
The company said that through its merger with D2H, it has been able to acquire a subscriber base in dense urban areas as well as the semi-urban and rural markets. It has attained synergies from scaling infrastructure, satellite, back end services, dealer and distribution network, which it will make use of to further expand subscriber base and strengthen footprint in the South Indian DTH market, it said.
“We are planning to add about 800 retail touchpoints every quarter and reach the 10,000 mark by 2019 in South India. Tamil Nadu is a prominent market due to its 1.5 million subscribers with a television penetration of almost 98 per cent. Given that digitisation (conversion to DAS 1 and DAS 2) from analogue services is happening in the region right now, we see more growth there,” said Sukhpreet Singh, Corporate Head - Marketing, Dish TV India Ltd.
“To better compete against local players like Arasu cables, we are looking to providing maximum content in regional languages like Tamil. In the last two months, we have added about 30-35 Tamil channels to our catalogue. Currently, we are providing more than 65 Tamil channels,” he added.
The company has laid out a three-pronged strategy to acquire new subscribers in the South Indian market: to provide the maximum number of channels in all regional languages, to bring out language packages for subscription and remove any access fee for HD channels.
Dish TV said it looks to expand its subscriber base in Tamil Nadu to 2.7 million customers from 1.5 million customers by the end of the year.