Anil Ambani eyes big pie in DTH space

 Anil Ambani's Reliance Big TV forays into the growing Direct to Home (DTH) services and draws up an ambitious plan to capture 40 per cent of the market share within 12 months.

Reliance Big TV, a subsidiary of Reliance Communications, will offer 202 channels initially and increase the bouque to 330-350 over a period of time, company CEO Arun Kapoor said here on Tuesday.

Against 120 million TV homes in India, world's second largest, only six million are connected to DTH services being provided by four players namely, Tata Sky, Dish TV, Sun TV and DD Direct.



"The number of DTH TV homes is likely to grow by an additional 11-12 million in a year from now and we aim to have 40 per cent market share of that," Kapoor said.



The DTH subscriber base is likely to go up to 60 million by 2015, he added.



The service will be available in over one lakh outlets across country's 6,500 towns including over 2,000 exclusive Reliance branded stores. By March next year, the reach would be extended to 10,000 towns, he said.
"We are ready to provide the service to five million homes," Kapoor said adding that STBs would be outsourced from various vendors including Hyundai and ZTB.
He, however, did not rule out the possibility of setting up a Group-owned STB manufactruing facility in the distant future, saying," As of now, we don't have any plan. We will see that in future".

To facilitate the service roll out, Reliance Big TV has set up a call centre which would operate from two locations and capable of handling over 50,000 calls a day.

"An army capable of installing over 15,000 daily connections with specially trained installers would ensure fulfilment of every customer order within 48-72 hours," Kapoor said.

Apart from the existing four players, Bharti and Videocon are also planning to launch DTH service in the next few months.
Kapoor, however, is optimistic of being emerge as the leading player in the field through its 'superior product' and ruled out roping in any celebrity to endorse the brand.
"Big TV will mark the shift of TV content control from broadcaster to customer hands and define the future of TV viewing in India. We believe our product is superior and thus we don't need a big celebrity to endorse it. Our product is itself a big hero," Kapoor said.

Idea defers open offer to Spice shareholders

MUMBAI: Idea Cellular, India's fifth largest private telecom operator, has deferred its open offer for an additional 20 percent stake in Spice Communications in which the Aditya Birla Firm has already picked up 41 percent stake through open market and block trade transactions in July.

In a statement to the Bombay Stock Exchange Thursday, the company said: "The revised schedule of activities in respect of the offer pertaining to acquisition of the equity shares of Spice will be announced separately on receipt of observations from SEBI in terms of the regulations."

The open offer was earlier scheduled to open Aug 22 and close on Sep 11.

Idea Cellular has acquired 2 million equity shares, representing 0.29 percent in Spice Communications, at an average market price of Rs.74.81 each through open market transactions on July 9.

Further, Idea Cellular through a block trade had acquired over 281.4 million equity shares, representing 40.8 percent at a price of Rs.77.30 per share.

According to the market regulation, Idea has to make an open offer to the Spice shareholders to acquire up to 137,985,050 equity shares of face value Rs.10 each representing in aggregate 20 percent of the paid-up equity share capital of Spice at a price of Rs.77.30 per share.

In the afternoon trade, the stock of Idea cellular was trading at Rs.87, down 0.45 percent from its previous close, and that of Spice Communication at Rs.74.40, losing 0.75 percent.

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