Tata Sky aims to double subscriber base to 9million by 2012

Direct-to-home (DTH) player Tata Sky Ltd expects to double its subscriber base to nine million by 2012 as it plans add more interactive applications and television channels to its platform.

“We expect to double our subscriber base by 2012,” said Mr Vikram Kaushik, CEO, Tata Sky. The three-year-old DTH player had a subscriber base of 4.5 million as of November 2009.

Tata Sky is a joint venture between the Tata Group and Star. The Tata Group owns 70 per cent stake in the DTH player, while Star holds 20 per cent and the remaining 10 per cent is held by Temasek.

Mr Kaushik said the company plans to invest heavily in strengthening its customer service initiatives. SerWizSol, a Tata Group company, runs three call centres for Tata Sky across the country at Mohali, Pune and Hyderabad offering customer support in 11 languages.

Tata Sky recently added eight new channels including Discovery Science and Discovery Turbo to its platform increasing the total number of channels to 180. It also added two Bengali and two Marathi channels.

“There are hardly any popular channels that are not on our platform. The new channel addition will be driven by the customer demand,” Mr Kaushik said adding the company will focus on offering more and more interactive applications.

Currently, Tata Sky has some 10 interactive applications on its platform such as Actve Games, Actve Cooking and Actve Kids among others.

Tata Sky has already roped in over 70,000 subscribers for its Actve English, an interactive application that was launched in late December.

Tata Sky competes with players such as Dish TV and Sun Direct in a rapidly growing Indian market, where DTH penetration is less than a fifth of the television base of 13 crore.

RNCOS, a market research and information analysis firm, expects the DTH subscriber base in the country to grow at a compounded annual growth of 28 per cent in 2010-12.