The Hindu Business Line : Pay TV solutions provider NDS to invest $150 m in India

Mr Vikram Kaushik (left), Managing Director & CEO, Tata Sky; Ms Sue Taylor, Senior Vice-President and General Manager, Asia Pacific, NDS Technologies; Dr Abraham Peled, Chairman & CEO, NDS Group; and Mr Anuj Gandhi, Digital Entertainment Network, at a press conference in the Capital on Tuesday.

Our Bureau

New Delhi, Nov. 4 News Corporation-owned digital pay TV solutions provider NDS Group has announced an investment of $150 million over the next four years in India.

Betting on the growing Indian market, NDS, which opened a New Delhi office a few months back, did not specify what the money will be spent on. The opportunity offered by the 100-million TV households is attractive in itself, what is a bonus is the vibrant TV content industry and the high number of TV viewing hours, said Dr Abraham Peled, Chairman and CEO, NDS.

“Already the rate of daily additions of Indian subscriber is twice or three times that of what was the peak in the US. It shows the massive scale of the market here,” said Dr Peled. Technology, he added, would also be adopted very fast in India given that statistically the Indian population is relatively young and younger people are more technology savvy.

With clients such as DTH operators Tata Sky and Airtel Digital TV, and multi-system operators Hathway and Digital Entertainment Network in India, the company also operates a R&D centre from Bangalore.

Already many of the electronic programme guides and pay TV solutions for international markets are being developed in Bangalore.

NDS is also considering opening another centre in North India, but has not finalised those plans yet. The Nasdaq-listed company, in the process of going private, claims to protect over $65 million in business revenues for Indian pay-TV broadcasting customers annually in India.

Mr Anuj Gandhi, CEO, Digital Entertainment Network (DEN), and Mr Vikram Kaushik, MD and CEO, Tata Sky, were also present at the conference in the Capital on Tuesday. While Tata Sky has recently launched the NDS Digital Video Recorder (DVR) which lets subscribers record TV programme for viewing at one’s own convenience, DEN also said it planned to offer DVRs to its subscribers in the first six months of next year.

Hathway, another NDS client, is already offering the NDS XTV DVR.