Dish TV looks to add 1.5 lakh new customers in AP

Hyderabad: Dish TV India, one of the leading direct-to-home players in the country with 1.5 crore customer base, is looking to add 1.5 lakh new customers in Andhra Pradesh by cashing on the on-going digitization in the city as well as Visakhapatnam. "We are hopeful of adding nearly one lakh new customers in Hyderabad while the remaining numbers will come from Visakhapatnam," Salil Kapoor, Chief Operating Officer, Dish TV India, told media on Wednesday. Hyderabad and Visakhaptanam are among the 38 cities in the country where digitization of cable television services is mandated to be completed by March 30, 2013. Central government undertook this second phase of its digitization after completing the exercise in New Delhi and Mumbai in the first phase. Though Chennai and Kolkata also figured in the first phase, the implementation was still under process when the deadline for the first phase ended on October 31, 2012. Under the digitization process, nearly five lakh households in Hyderabad and four lakh in Visakhapatnam are expected to shift to the digital platform. "We expect a significant chunk of these customers will opt for DTH services and we are ready to tap the demand," Kapoor stated. The company plans to add the new customers during April and May when most of the people who are using analogue cable services will look for digitalized options. Nationwide, Dish TV is looking to add around 10 lakh new customers in the second phase of digitization. "If the 90 per cent (66 lakh) of the households are digitized across 38 cities by the deadline, nearly 50 per cent of them are expected to opt for DTH services. We are targeting over 30 per cent of them," he explained. He said that increase of import duty on set top boxes from five to 10 per cent in the recent budget would adversely impact the industry. "We are already paying over 40 per cent of the set top box cost as taxes. This will be an additional burden on the DTH operators which are providing the boxes to new customers on subsidized prices," Kapoor maintained.