Scoring new goals

Representational pic

A packed sports calendar for India, leading up from the Indian Premier League (IPL), progressing to the Wimbledon and the Football World Cup (FIFA) and going all the way up to the India-England cricket series, F1 German Grand Prix, and Commonwealth Games is bringing in new customers for Direct-to-Home (DTH) companies. Most report 15-20 per cent rise in subscribers in the last few months leading from the IPL to the FIFA World Cup. India has over 55 million direct to home subscribers, growing at healthy double digits. Globally, plum sports properties are a lucrative source of revenue for pay television platforms, who often bid and counter bid each other for the rights.
At the forefront of the sports celebration party is pay television company Tata Sky which is a joint venture between Tata group and Star India. The firm says that it has seen an increase in demand for Tata Sky HD—its high definition service, and its HD PVR—its personal video recorder set top boxes during the Indian Premier League (IPL) and the FIFA Cup.The DTH operator claims to have seen significant subscriber additions in areas such as the North East and South India. It has also launched its ‘Everywhere TV’application on personal computers along with smartphones and tablets that it was already catering to.
Vikram Mehra,chief commercial officer at Tata Sky said that the overall ramp-up in subscribers was ‘substantial’. “Subscription for Sony Six has naturally gone up,” he says, “But what is more interesting that we have seen a windfall in the sale of high definition boxes.In fact,70-75 per cent of our sales in recent months are on high definition boxes alone. Earlier the demand for high definition content mainly came from the bigger towns. Today, it is the small towns that are specifically seeking high definition connections. There is a disproportionate swing in favour of high definition content and this swing can be attributed to premium sports properties,” he said. He also said that the sale of recorder boxes or PVR as Tata Sky calls them has increased visibly. “In the top 20-30 towns, the sale of PVR boxes has more than doubled since many of the matches run well into the night.”Anticipating that more people will sample television on the go,Tata Sky also introduced this application on laptop, anticipating the demand from kids and teenagers. Mehra is also looking closely at the number of professional leagues that are springing up in the country in areas such as hockey, kabbadi, football, etc. Domestic clubs and leagues may grow the business of sports still further, remarks Mehra and this could only mean good news for DTH companies.
Airtel DTH claims to be one of the two DTH companies offering all four high definition sports channels— Star Sports 1, Star Sports 2, Ten and Sony Six.For the FIFA season, Airtel DTH says that it introduced a special offer where customers buying a new Airtel digital television connection during FIFA were offered Sony Six channel free for the entire duration until the finale. Airtel also launched pocket TV service this year which enables subscribers to watch over 150 Live TV channels, over 10,000 hours of video content on their mobile screens.Pocket TV was launched with the IPL and the French Open matches in mind, said an Airtel official.
Prasana Krishnan,business head at Sony Six,Multi Screen Media said that DTH companies are coming up with a number of joint promotions with properties such as FIFA,which only goes to show that they are getting a lot of subscribers on the back of these.“FIFA would have got the DTH companies the largest number of subscriber additions in recent times” says Krishnan, “Football is quite a force in terms of bringing in both urban viewers and the youth. Unfortunately the television audience measurement reporting mechanism is limited and does not give us a clear picture of how many viewers come from DTH homes.”
Dish TV, part of the Zee group, is also offering Sony Six free to its new subscribers. Salil Kapoor, chief operating officer, Dish TV said that FIFA viewing pockets were more pronounced in West Bengal, Odisha and Kerala. “What is interesting is that people opt for new television sets during these games and in the process also opt for a new DTH connection. There is substantial increase in the number of subscribers over the last few months.But I think that the IPL got us more subscribers, since it has pan-India appeal.”
Mautik Tolia,executive vice president at Neo Sports said that globally, pay TV platforms mop up huge money as subscription revenue on sports properties. In India, the pitch will only get louder as the television business gets more organised and DTH companies launch into value added services in order to keep up with global trends.