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Nagpal does not believe in halting the flow of money for building Tata Sky as the ultimate direct-to-home (DTH) brand in the country, enjoying the highest ARPU and offering premium value-added services. He is putting in Rs 900 crore ( Rs 9 billion) for upgrading from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 so that Tata Sky can accommodate more channels and make up for the transponder space crunch.
Nagpal believes that DTH should play a more defining role in shaping up the business model for distribution platform operators. “Benchmarking DTH cost with cable is wrong. Why should DTH go back to medieval times? Cable needs to embrace the cost structures and transparencies of the DTH model,” he says.
According to him, consolidation among the DTH players in terms of mergers and acquisitions is out of the horizon at this stage.
In an interview with TelevisionPost.com’s Sibabrata Das, the Tata Sky MD & CEO talks about the regressive 20 per cent sectoral cap imposed on the DTH industry, technical interoperability and the issue of licence fee.
Edited Excerpts…
Some DTH operators are trying to develop carriage as a revenue stream. Will Tata Sky take this revenue option seriously?
We are in the business of trading in content, not transponders. Customers want us to provide television channels that they prefer to watch. We are not here to hire transponders and make money by carrying unwanted television channels on our platform and charging the content owners. We charge our customers and pay a part of this money to the content producers.
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