Anil Dirubha Ambani Group’s Reliance Communications launched Big TV Direct to Home television on August 15. There are now three major players in India’s DTH market:
- Zee’s Dish TV
- Tata’s Tata Sky and
- Anil Ambani’s Big TV.
By all appearances, Big TV seems to have a competitive edge, with movie quality broadcasts using the MPEG-4 technology, where as both Tata sky and Dish TV are still using the MPEG-2 formats.
While both Tata sky and Dish TV have 6 exclusive movie channels each. Big TV has a whopping 32 exclusive movie channels, but this feature will not be as big an incentive as it appears, because the users have to pay for everything that they watch. The picture-in-picture view IPiP) or multichannel views in Big TV is 12, whereas in the other two, there’s an upper limit at 8. The audio broadcasted across all Big TV channels is CD quality. Unlike Dish TV and Tata Sky, Big TV will be broadcasting all the sports channels available in the subcontinent. Moreover, the DTH service will have the backing of Adlabs.
Big TV matches or betters the competition in other small features as well. There are over 200 channels available with the subscription, 120 movies, and a promise of a new movies every fifteen days.
The best offer in terms of pleasing the customers is that any one of the available regional sections are completely free.
The launch offer for the service is Rs 1,490, which includes 10 audio channels, 20 movie channels free for 3 months, and one regional pack.
There are various subscription schemes ranging from Rs 100 to Rs 475.
The biggest advantage is of course the DVD quality images being broadcast. If everything goes well, Reliance plans to put up eight to ten HDTV (High Definition Television) channels by the end of the year.
