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Mr Jawahar Goel

Ambar Singh Roy

Kolkata, Aug. 17 Dish TV is likely to spend Rs 100-125 crore on marketing, brand promotion and customer-acquisition initiatives during the current fiscal. In 2007-08, the company spent Rs 103 crore on similar initiatives, according to Mr Jawahar Goel, Managing Director of Dish TV.

Mr Goel told Business Line that the number of cable households in India was set to go up from an estimated 77 million in 2008 to 105 million in 2012 and further to 132 million by 2015. The number of households subscribing to direct-to-home (DTH) services is also estimated to go up from around seven million at present to 33 million by 2012. The incremental conversion to DTH is currently pegged at around 3.5 lakh a month.

According to Mr Goel, Dish TV now has a DTH subscriber base of around 3.5 million while Tata Sky and Sun TV account for the rest. Other players who are considering entering the DTH arena include Bharti, Reliance and Videocon. Mr Goel said the cost of customer acquisition was high in the DTH domain, and it would be in the ratio of 80:20 spend in customer acquisition vis-À-vis customer retention.

“To attain growth levels that we expect, the DTH industry has to collectively spend Rs 500-600 crore annually on marketing and customer education,” he said, adding that while analogue cable TV can accommodate a maximum of 60 channels, in the digital domain, as many as 2,000 channels can “technically” be accommodated.

“The country is ready for DTH with 3.5 lakh conversions taking place every month. However, the market is expected to mature to the comfort of the industry only by 2010,” Mr Goel said.

He added that players in the DTH domain have to go all out to educate customers with a view to garnering market share.

Dish TV has as its brand ambassador Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan. There are no plans to get any other icon to replace or complement him as “he is more stable than any other celebrity in the country, including cricketers”, Mr Goel said.

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