This move will make Dish TV, an Essel Group company, the first DTH operator to have installed their DTH services in consumer homes, cars, buses, aircraft, cruise liners and on trains. "Dish everywhere is our motto. We aim to provide our DTH services across all platforms, whether moving, flying or stationary," a senior Dish TV executive said. This move is likely to help the company market its services to the potential consumers more effectively.
The regulator may ask broadcasters to abide by the tribunal's pricing formula.
During May-June, sales of not only seasonal consumer goods such as ACs and refrigerators go up, but also with more and more families going abroad for holidays, there is a surge in sales of cameras and camcorders and even laptops, according to industry observers. While Reliance Digital is offering value for money combo offers on cellphones to laptops and televisions.
The govt was supposed to issue the CAS expansion notification by April 30. The expansion of the conditional access system beyond southern parts of Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata, and subsequently to 55 more cities, may be further delayed with the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting seeking a detailed report from the cable industry on tackling piracy of pay channels after the system comes into effect.
The price-war has begun in the direct-to-home market with the country's largest DTH company Dish TV with over three million subscribers getting ready to offer its connection virtually free. Any consumer who wants to buy a Dish TV connection will not have to pay for the set-top box, the hardware essential to access DTH services, which normally costs Rs 2,500.
According to the ratings data released by the online media ratings agency Audience Measurement and Analytics Ltd (aMap) for April 25-27, SetMax not only got higher average viewership ratings than Star Plus between 8 pm and 9 pm, when the quiz show aired, but the average time spent on SetMax (40 minutes) was double what viewers spent on Star Plus.
The rise in raw material costs has caused a 10 per cent increase in the retail prices of fast-moving consumer goods as companies are passing on the rise in costs.
In a move to focus on its core FMCG strength, the Burman family, promoters of Dabur India, last week announced their exit from the pharma business.
In order to take on the competition posed by the direct-to-home (DTH) operators, large cable distribution companies will soon bring in their own digital-quality cable television offerings in select cities at competitive fees and offer quality service support.
Miguel A Torres, president, Torres group of companies, has his friendly, blue eyes fixed on the bubbling market. "We will invest $1 million to hire more people and expand to other parts. We have already invested the same over the last six years," he says. Torres produces red, white, sparkling, and dessert wines, ranging from single vineyard to mass-market brands.
All major players in the Rs 1,200-crore (Rs 12 billion) ice cream market are set to adorn a health-oriented look this year by offering more such products. Amul has already launched probiotic health and wellness ice creams and is also offering sugar free variants. Mother Dairy has decided to expand its naturally flavoured offerings along with its new packaging. HUL introduced Moo ice cream under the health and wellness umbrella. Aavin has also launched a low-sugar ice-cream.
For long, McDonald's has been riding on the affordability plank, advertising its prices that are apparently a throwback to an era. Now, it has to share the plank with India's oldest fast food giant, Nirula's when it comes to people picked from sepia tone menus. In spite of a rise in input costs, homegrown fast food chain Nirula's, which a-decade-and-a-half ago was the only one of its kind in Delhi, has slashed its prices.
They might have made little headway in the market so far, but leading Chinese consumer electronics companies are busy drawing up big plans to expand their footprints in India. After acquiring Anchor Daewoo's appliance business last year, Haier is on the prowl for some local brands. TCL is getting ready to expand its product range to mobile phones and home appliances.
Dish TV and Tata Sky, the country's two direct-to-home (DTH) companies, are expected to post losses in excess of Rs 1,400 crore for 2007-08 in their quest to expand the market by offering set-top boxes at subsidised rates. The companies have over five million subscriber homes across the country collectively.
The Indian Broadcasting Foundation (IBF), the apex body of broadcasters, and Advertising Agencies Association of India (AAAI), a body that represents over 70 per cent of the television advertisers have decided to tigten their rules. All advertisers will now have to make payments within 60 days of airing the television commercials, failing which there will be a financial penalty and a possible boycott on all television networks. This 2-year agreement is valid till March 2010.
This has been agreed between the Indian Broadcasting Foundation, an apex body of broadcasters, and the Advertising Agencies Association of India, which represents over 70 per cent of TV advertisers in India and has over 120 members represented by leading advertising agencies and broadcasters.
This means that if Star TV's bouquet of 14 channels is priced at Rs 88 in non-CAS areas (70 million cable TV homes), it can charge only Rs 44 or less from existing DTH operators like Tata Sky, Dish TV and new entrants like Big TV, Bharti and Sun Direct. But all broadcasters are charging more from DTH companies than from non-CAS cable homes.
In terms of price, Tag Heuer mobile phones will be positioned at the top end of the market and cost about Rs 2,21,000. Switzerland-based Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy group, which owns the brand, has decided to launch the phones in India at the same time as their global launch.
Discovery Networks India Executive Vice-President and MD Deepak Shourie said that the DTH platform has been able to quickly penetrate cable homes by reaching out to 5 million subscribers within a couple of years. Discovery Communications globally offers channels such as Discovery Health, Military Channel, TLC, Science Channel, Investigation Discovery among others. The group might bring in one of these channels for the DTH platform, sources indicated.
The process may begin as early as November this year if the cable industry's plan, submitted to the ministry of information and broadcasting, is accepted. CAS has been implemented only in parts of these three cities. As the technology enables consumers to choose channels, the expansion will bring down the average monthly cable bill of about 7.2 million consumers in the non-CAS areas in these cities by almost half to Rs 150-Rs 200.
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