As per the forecasts made by the analysts, Indian DTH market will be the biggest in the world by 2014 growing at CAGR of 28 percent. However if you go by the existing trends, it will achieve this landmark by 2012. Direct-to-Home (DTH) segment of the pay TV market made the most of opportunity and leveraged their pan India presence and corporate brand equity to achieve the numbers that have beaten all the forecasts given by industry analysts. Currently the DTH market is served by six market players- Dish TV, Tata Sky, Sun Direct, Big TV, Airtel Digital TV and Videocon d2h.

Given the superior quality of DTH services in terms of viewing and interactivity, DTH subscriber base has grown to 24 million subscribers Presently most of the set top boxes (STBs) supplied by the operators are Standard Definition (SD) zappers and very few Personal Video Recorders (PVRs).

India is a wireless country and DTH service is following a growth pattern that is similar to the mobile service.

Future trends

At the very least, plain vanilla SD, DTH allows the viewers to choose between the incumbent national television provider and analog cable operator. At the higher end of the spectrum, High Definition (HD) Personal Video Recorders (PVRs) will allow the viewer to control what he watches in ways previously thought impossible. And finally, it is the content that will drive growth across the wide variety of audiences.

Having acquired the critical mass, DTH market will witness segmentation within the sector driven by slew of product launches by DTH operators just before the Commonwealth Games.

High Definition (HD) STBs and content will be the key driver of growth from technological stand point and Commonwealth Games (CWG) will be the key enabler from the event perspective.

Value added services today contribute less than 5 percent of the revenues. Going forward this will increase to 20 percent of the total revenue as service providers are constantly coming up with innovative propositions to harness the medium's potential as their subscriber base is has grown exponentially.

LCD TV penetration and growth will also act as a catalyst for demand creation of these high end products and services.

IPTV will pose competition to DTH operators in the long run particularly in the high end segment of the markets as major telcos have already lunched their IPTV service in select cities and have plans to launch Pan India service. IPTV will take the competition to the next level as features like time shift are offered as part of the standard package apart from bundled solutions offering triple play (voice, data & video) to the subscribers.

HD STB's particularly PVRs are fairly complex products from execution standpoint. We at Altech UEC are leveraging our experience in the developed markets to execute high-end HD projects and are working closely with service providers, CAS, middleware and chipset vendors for project execution.

Some of DTH operators have launched High Definition (HD) zappers and PVRs in the market and others have definite plans to launch these high end products in the second quarter to capitalize on the euphoria created around the Commonwealth Games. Availability of HD content is increasing and we believe Doordarshan will play its role to offer HD content in certain niche areas.

Going by the sheer potential of the market and the growth rate forecasts looks like the show has just begun.