The Hindu : Business : Big TV touches half a million subscriber-mark

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Tuesday, Oct 21, 2008
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Big TV touches half a million subscriber-mark

Special Correspondent

— PHOTO: VIVEK BENDRE

A MILESTONE: Arun Kapoor (left), President, Big TV, with Sanjay Behl, Head, Branding and Marketing, Reliance Communications, at a press conference in Mumbai on Monday.

MUMBAI: Big TV, the DTH arm of Reliance Communications, has touched the figure of five subscribers within two months of its launch. The company is now targeting five million subscribers within the first year of operations and plans to double its channel bouquet from 200 to 400 by next year.

Arun Kapoor, President, Big TV, said at a press conference that “Our plans of defining the future of TV viewing in India are on desired course, and we are fully geared to add over four lakh subscribers every month with an on-ground infrastructure spanning 6,500 Indian towns.”

“Big TV’s half-million subscriber milestone is equivalent to 40 per cent of the industry’s gross additions during the last two months,” said Mr. Kapoor.

Big TV had already tied up with Thomson Headend Systems for a complete head-end system to boost its number of channels. To augment its growth plans, it had already booked four more transponders of the MEASAT satellite, which would take its total transponder capacity to 12.

The world’s latest MPEG4 technology platform on Big TV enables it to offer double the number of channels in the same transponder capacity as against established DTH players.

On future plans, Mr. Kapoor said the company would launch DVR (digital video recorder) by December-end and also plans to launch interactive cricket and interactive news by then. By mid-2009, the company expected to have launched 15-20 high definition (HD) channels.

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