Zee's DTH Business (Dish TV)

Zee's direct-to-home (DTH) service Dish TV has rolled out plans to commercially offer the latest Bollywood selection on demand from mid-October, and to sell PVR sets from mid-November of this year. Initially, the VoD service from Dish TV will be a 'near' video on demand. It will be priced at Rs 40 per movie and will offer a selection of upto five movies a day. Siti Cable, the cable services operator from Zee group, is looking to migrate to a digital set-up. Digitization offers scope for various valued added services such as Video on Demand, EPG, pay per view etc.

In phase one of digitization, cities like Delhi, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Kolkata, Chandigarh, Varanasi, Kanpur, Haryana and Mumbai are the cities who can boast of digital networks of Siti Cable, paving the way for improving the quality of service and making some additional value additions too. It was in 2004 that MSOs like Siti Cable, Hathway and InCablenet began to aggressively market STB-enabled digital services, firming up plans to invest in programmes for pay per view services and secure more agreements with niche channels. Additionally, MSOs intend to develop new revenue streams from broadband Internet services and VOIP telephony.

But the company does not have plans to offer broadband in a big way. "Currently company offers broadband and Net services in Bangalore (subscriber base: 6,700) through their own gateway, but they don’t have any big plans for the broadband.

Zee Telefilms has tied up with IBM to develop end-to-end digital media asset management solution called ZAMS (Zee Asset Management Solution) to deliver content to emerging mediums like Internet Protocol TV, High Definition TV, Video on Mobile and Video on Demand (Company already offers english as well as hindi movies through its DTH platform). After this it will be having end-to-end technology platform for digital acquisition, development and playout of entertainment content. The entire initiative of implementation and integration at Zee headquarters in Mumbai and broadcast center at Noida will be completing in September 2006. The estimated cost of entire implementation and digitization of existing assets will be over $7 million.