Tata Sky is looking to make Tata Sky Everywhere completely free. Mukut Deepak , Senior Vice President, Strategy and Business Development, Tata Sky, reveals that free is the magical word and the drive behind an increase in terms subscribers. In the following interview given to NexTV India, Deepak exposes Tata Sky’s plan to increase their share of the market.
- Q. How is Tata Sky faring in the Indian market?
- A. We break the Indian market in 3 different type of terrains. One is the six metros which are the first phase of digitisation known as DAS I. The second is the 40 metros and the last one is the 400 towns which are just coming on board. Our strategy for each of these three groups are very different.
- Q. So let’s start by Das III
- A. It is about revving up your sales, distribution and service infrastructure. You need to get your fundamentals right to make sure you reach out to as many prospective subscribers as possible and give them a compelling reason to move to you from a terrestrial or cable platform.
- Q. What are the strategies for DAS II?
- A. On the second bucket which is about the 40 towns, it is about enhancing user experience and linked revenues. It is about giving them more and more High Definition (HD) content and more avenues to spend on content like Video On Demand (VOD).
- Q. And finally DAS I?
- A. For the third bucket which is the top six cities where you have the best infrastructure. And not only in terms of DTH built in terms of broadband where citizens are globally aware and globally wired-in, the play is very different for us. Here it is about becoming content, platform and monetisation model agnostic.
In fact, what this means is that on the content side, how do we go beyond broadcast content and bring best of web or bring a bunch of exclusive stuff specially generated by Tata Sky under one of our services.
On distribution it boils down to making available as in time-shifted, device shifted and device agnostic. So how are you present not just across of broadcast but in terms of OTT and online consumption platforms. And how do you enable seamless shifting of consumption across devices and across platforms. That’s the second paradigm.
The third paradigm becomes on the monetisation side. We have classically only looked at subscriptions but how do we go beyond that to potentially something that has advertisement as a source of revenue as well. Hence, if you do all of that, we are potentially looking at a very different form of content consumption. More of sachet driven consumptions, more of personalised plans and multiple plans in each household. So a very different monetisation paradigm. That’s how we are breaking it up. Three different part of the country and three different strategies for them.
- Q. Is Tata Sky planning to launch an Over-The-Top (OTT) service?
- A.Incidentally we already have an OTT service which is only open to our box or DTH subscribers. It is called Tata Sky Everywhere. It has got a few million downloads but so far you have to pay an additional amount for subscribing and using it, so we only have a few hundred thousand active users. Now we are planning to bundle it along with our core detailed subscribing. Free is the magical word here. We believe we will have a lot more active subscribers on that platform.
- Q. What will the app be in terms of content?
- A. There is a concerted effort to get a lot more non-broadcast content and OTT exclusive content sitting on that app which will make it even more compelling. The third factor, as you have seen in other developed markets, we would look to open to someone who has not necessarily bought a Tata Sky DTH connection but who just wants to consume a lot of broadcast and non-broadcast content through the OTT route.
- Q. In relation to subscriptions, is there an increase?
- A.We have been growing our number of subscribers at a very steady pace. We have been the market leader in terms of adding new subscribers both growth and active subscribers. We do not see a slow-down on that. There are three or four drivers that make us believe that it will accelerate further.
First, there are around 80 million cable or analogue households that will come into play in the next few years as the digitisation mandate is completely rolled out. That is a new set of subscribers that will be available.
Even in existing DAS 1 which consists of the top 45 towns, you see multiple subscriptions in the same households. So that’s a further bump up in the figures.
- Q. In that sense, the digital process in India will only help to increase the numbers?
- A. More importantly, we see a certain acceptance for Tata Sky propositions which is slightly higher than our competitors, so we getting shares year on year. Natural subscription momentum is out there. As far as digital goes, I think the big point we are making is that it is an ad-owned and not a substitution.
First of all, our TV consumption is like 60% in a market such as the USA and you have seen digital adding another half of what TV consumption represents in the country. So we are practically looking at a doubling of video consumption hours in India. So we do not see a bump down and it gives us access to additional video consumption hours.
But the question is that do we have a robust video consumption platform outside of our DTH. If we have that the potentially the number of videos watched hours on our platform would be even higher. So it is not subscribers anymore but it is in fact video hours viewed on your platform and there is even additional room for growth out there.
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