Regulate DTH service tariff for healthy growth: Tata Sky

New Delhi, Aug 8 (UNI) To ensure a healthy growth in the Direct-to-Home (DTH) sector, leading DTH player Tata Sky today called for regulation of tariff by the government.

''Tariff rationalisation is a must. DTH is currently saddled by bundling of content by broadcasters. It is important that prices are regulated, so that quality of services can be further enhanced,'' said company Managing Director and CEO Vikram Kaushik.

He also advocated allowing partial exclusivity of content for the DTH players. ''The current recommendation says 'No exclusive contracts would be permitted between the broadcasters and distributors of TV channels', but if a mere 15-20 per cent of exclusive content is allowed, that would be an incentive for players to invest in newer transparent platforms like DTH,'' Mr Kaushik said.

Tata Sky, in one year of its business, has done well across the country. ''We have done extremely well pan-India. But, we could have done better in south India,'' he added.

The company is also looking toward introducing a SMS recharge facility. Earlier, it had started its web recharge service.

Tata Sky currently has 30,000 dealers of which 245 are exclusive dealers. ''We would increase the number as the demand arises. The number of exclusive dealers would be increased to about 300 in some time,'' Mr Kaushik said.

The company is committed to spend Rs 2,000 crore in the medium run for various operations. ''We spent Rs 1,000 crore during the last one year,'' said Mr Kaushik adding the company was not looking toward increasing the number of uplinking centres as their centre at Delhi is capable for serving five million consumers.

and is highly sophisticated,'' Mr Kaushik said.

UNI