Anil Ambani's Reliance Big TV forays into the growing direct to home services and draws up an ambitious plan to capture 40 per cent of the market share within 12 months.
Reliance Big TV, a subsidiary of Reliance Communications, will offer 202 channels initially and increase the bouque to 330-350 over a period of time, company CEO Arun Kapoor said in Mumbai on Tuesday.
Against 120 million TV homes in India, world's second largest, only six million are connected to DTH services being provided by four players namely, Tata Sky, Dish TV, Sun TV and DD Direct.
"The number of DTH TV homes is likely to grow by an additional 11-12 million in a year from now and we aim to have 40 per cent market share of that," Kapoor said.
The DTH subscriber base is likely to go up to 60 million by 2015, he added.
The service will be available in over one lakh outlets across country's 6,500 towns including over 2,000 exclusive Reliance branded stores. By March next year, the reach would be extended to 10,000 towns, he said.
"We are ready to provide the service to five million homes," Kapoor said, adding that STBs would be outsourced from various vendors including Hyundai and ZTB.
He, however, did not rule out the possibility of setting up a Group-owned STB manufactruing facility in the distant future, saying," As of now, we don't have any plan. We will see that in future".
To facilitate the service roll out, Reliance Big TV has set up a call centre which would operate from two locations and capable of handling over 50,000 calls a day.
"An army capable of installing over 15,000 daily connections with specially trained installers would ensure fulfilment of every customer order within 48-72 hours," Kapoor said.
Apart from the existing four players, Bharti and Videocon are also planning to launch DTH service in the next few months.
Kapoor, however, is optimistic of being emerge as the leading player in the field through its 'superior product' and ruled out roping in any celebrity to endorse the brand.
"Big TV will mark the shift of TV content control from broadcaster to customer hands and define the future of TV viewing in India. We believe our product is superior and thus we don't need a big celebrity to endorse it. Our product is itself a big hero," Kapoor said.
