Amit’s lab

ALRIGHT!!! THE PARTY IS ON. The war has begun with the latest entrant being Bharti in the Indian Satellite TV (DTH) space. Bharti entered the market with the brand name “Airtel Digital TV” a day before. For the past one week, Airtel was running teaser campaign (”See you at home soon”) for its Digital TV launch. Reliance retaliated almost overnight by takign over this teaser campaign almost same to Airtel one and played the spoiler for Airtel. Remember that age old Pepsi Vs. Coca Cola advert battles. That’s what Reliance did to Bharti.

Please make sure to read the complete post if you are planning to buy one or shift to another broadcaster.

First things first. I’ll explain the basics of satellite TV so that many of you can understand the logic behind all this hooplah. Satellite TV or DTH (Direct To Home) is not a new concept. Many of the other countries are already into this for donkey years. US being the leading brat among everyone as usual. DirecTV has been there for long enough with best of technology to offer. Satellite TV offers you to watch everything directly on to your TV sets beamed from the Satellites. That means, no more hassles of cable operators. If you are from India, you must have faced irrational charges, cable operator strikes, power outages, not getting your favourite channels, channels shifting their channel number positions, bullying of cable operator staff bullying, monopolized area distribution. And the list of problems goes on. Satellite TV puts an end to all the woes of the customers. Because, in DTH, your cable operator is a satellite now which never goes down on a strike.

In Satellite TV, the signal is beamed directly from a satellite which the broadcaster has hired. The signal is received directly by the small dish antenna installed at your house or premises. Broadcaster provides a Set Top Box which connects to this dish antenna directly with a cable and in turn, this Set Top Box connects to your TV. Bang!!! Watch the channel you wish. The best part is that you pay for only those channels you wish to watch. For example, you don’t need to pay for Sports channels if you don’t like sports. Or why to pay for Fashion TV if there is no more “Midnight Hot” being allowed in India.

The major advantages of Satellite TV are:

1) Digital Signal: It means that the signal you see is crystal clear and no more visible noise on the screen. Its like watching a DVD. In short, the picture quality is near perfect.

2) Digital Audio: For the first time, you’ll get the stereophonic sound. So, if you got a home theatre, its the best time to connect it to your Set Top Box. You’ll get the Dolby effects.

3) Electronic Program Guide (EPG) : You’ll be able to see the program schedule or listing for all the channels. EPG is one crucial feature where all the broadcasters fight. This is one application where you can book programs for reminders/recording. Set up your favourite channel list. Block your children from watching adult content (no adult content is being broadcasted in India ). See advertisments. Search programs. And the list of features goes on varying for every broadcaster or service provider.

4) Payment Modules: you pay only what you watch. Payment is in advance. and you can pay for the whole year in one shot too. (Pay for the whole lifetime if you know it ). Payment is just damn easy with various sources like internet, mobile phones, vendors, banking etc.

5) Conditional Access: This is most important feature of Satellite TV. But this is just technical and doesn’t matter for the end user. If you have seen a smart card containing a small chip inside you Set Top box, that’s what I am referring to. This protects the signal you are watching being hacked. If this card is hacked, its the braodcaster who looses money, you don;t need to bother about .

6) Interactive Applications: All the broadcasters offer interactive content. Whether it is booking for tickets or watching details of a product or watching highlights of a match or quizzing live, everything is controlled by these applications. You can watch a movie of your choice. You can get some recipies of dishes etc. This is one important point where you can differentiate between broadcasters.

There are many more things which can be done but I won’t mention it here as ti will take another couple of years for those features or things to appear in Indian market. Visit DirecTV for all the latest stuff happening in Satellite TV market where you’ll get to know what all is being done.

Now, Let’s take a closer look at all the DTH players in the Indian market.

Indian market has six DTH players till today with one more in the off’ing. They are DD Direct, Sun Direct, Dish TV, Tata Sky, Reliance Big TV, Airtel Digital TV. One more is supposed to join the bandwagon soon is Videocon.

1) DD-Direct: This is government owned DTH system. It broadcasts only free to air channels. It is being used mainly as CAS. It is popular in remote areas and villages of India.

2) Sun-Direct: It is popular in South India mainly for the reasons of broadcasting all south indian channels at cheap price. It has got a lousy EPG which looks like operating on some hardware driven GUI. Its customer service is very bad.

Okay, I didn’t talk much about the above mentioned two DTH players as they are not worth it. They are the basic and are alreays out of the race. Let’s move on to the stalwarts.

3) Dish TV: First broadcaster in India. They started slow in their operations but picked up only after the launch of Tata Sky. The software looks good but is buggy. Channel Surfing is not quite fast. Although the EPG looks good but not very intuitive. It supports all the above mentioned features. Currently, it offers the maximum numbers of channels and is cost effective. The low lights are that it is not very user friendly, buggy software resulting in crashes often, bas customer care department and very few interactive applications. Also, the channel tuning is quite slow. Currently, Dish TV has the maximum number of subscribers.but the future doesn’t look so bright.Just FYI, it runs on MPEG-2.

4) Tata Sky: The player who turned around the market. Coming from the biggest of fathers, Tatas and Sky (UK), it started big. The software is very good and is very user friendly or easy to use. It has a very good customer service but it doesn’t have a toll free number to call. Users need to make STD calls to reach customer care or dial 1860 which is premium usage number. The EPG is very intuitive and easy to use.The channel surfing in Tata Sky is quite fast. But it does not have PiG (Picture in Guide). It does offer a range of interactive applications. But doesn’t provide all the channels. I mean it has a limited number of channels which is its biggest drawback. The Showcase or movie channels offered are not too good. It also runs on MPEG-2 systems. It has EPG in two languages: Hindi and English.

5) Big TV: It was launched just couple of months ago with much fanfare. But the software is too bad. Even the basic quality has not been checked on the EPG. It does have a Picture in Guide and many interactive applications but the software crashes too often. The EPG is not at all intuitive and is very confusing. Even the Remote control keys are confusing with just symbols being depicted. The customer care is also not good. They are offering quite a good number of channels but the packaging is again confusing. They do offer all the features mentioned above but the software quality seems to put everyone off. Channel Surfing takes a lot of time. The only cool feature is the animations or the feel of EPG. Looks of the EPG are so bad that even a kid can find the mistakes. The EPG is symbol oriented which leads to user spending a lot of time to find the functionality. It runs on MPEG-4 systems. But, in short, I am writing off Big TV.

6) Airtel Digital TV: The latest entrant in the battle of Satellite TV space. They just launched two days ago. The software quality of Airtel is amazing. The EPG is quite user friendly. The look and feel is good and relates to the youth of today. The features offered by Airtel are not exceptional except that they have very good interactive applications running. The unique offering by Airtel is its universal remote which works both for STB and TV. The software performance of Airtel Digital TV is quite good again. Channel surfing is quite fast where it tunes only to the channel you wish to and skips the tuning if you are surfing. They have provided Airtel Live as they provide in their cell phone services. They also have a PiG(Picture in Guide) and support for Hindi and English language. The software is stable and making its mark or quality. I cannot comment on customer service much as its just two days after the launch. The only bad part is that I am not able to get it till now even after it was lunached two days ago. It runs on MPEG-4 systems.

All the above mentioned DTH players support or provide almost all the features mentioned above. Its just marketing gimmicks they are running on as the customer does not know what to buy. So, how will you decide what to buy. Following are the points to ponder if you are planning to buy one.

DO:
1) Consider the quality of the customer service provided by the broadcaster. This is one thing you’ll need atleast once a month especially, if you wish to change your channels packages often. I rate this as most important because, if the customer service is not good, you might end up missing you favourite programs. So, consider the past experience and brand name of the broadcaster in other areas.

2) Consider the channel packaging done by the broadcaster. Some one might be offering you all the channels free for six months but then, how will they make money. Once the free period is over, you might end up paying more for the same number of channels. This can happen because of the channel packaging. If you most favourite channels lie in different packages, you’ll end up paying for all other channels you never ever tune to.

3) Consider the software quality of the Set Top Box. Set Top Box works with a software running inside it and as you know, a bad software can crash anytime. I am sure you would not like you Set Top Box getting rebooted every half an hour or rebooted during a climax of a movie or during the last over of an India - Pakistan match.

4) Consider the performance of the Set Top Box.
     a) If you channel change takes long time, just don’t buy that vendor’s services. TV is for channel surfing. Imagine you plight, if every channel changes takes more than 1.5 seconds for tuning (In simple words, gets visible on screen). Check how fast you can zap through channels. To test this, Press channel Up key very fast about ten times, and if the tenth channel tunes after more than 5 seconds, it’s not worth buying.
     b) Check for other features of the Software. Like Reminders should work as expected. How many channels can be added to you favourite list? How easy is it to set reminders, favourites, browse channels, see the programme schedule, languages offered if you require multi-lingual system etc?
     c) Check for accuracy of data in programming schedule. I am sure you won’t like “Shrek” being referred as “Toy Story” in your EPG.
     d) Check for the number of days of programming schedule being offered. This helps in planing your TV viewing hours way ahead.

5) Consider the Payment System. If you are buying a system for your parents who don’t know internet or mobile phone usages, check for the payment options available. Always go for the broadcaster who has the biggest network of vendors and service centers. This makes it easy for your parents to walk-in easily at one shop and pay for the bills. Ofcourse, it implicitly assumes that lasrgest network might not be best in customer service. So, your experience will be good for your judgement.

6) Consider Interactive applications: This applies only if you are looking for more than channel surfing. Interactive applications open up a whole new world of TV Viewing experience. You can interact with TV programmes or other things in real time. If you love to see movies, check for the spcialized movie channels or gaming applications, repeat telecasts or highlights. Defnitely, i am assuming that you would have considered the preference for software performance as interactive applications are completely software oriented and bugs in applications can make your life misrable. Do look for the variety of applications.

7) Consider the hidden costs. Basically, do read the fine print or inquire about hidden costs. Advertisements never mention hidden costs or maintainance charges.

Consider the look and Feel. Ofcourse, this differs with liking of person to person. Please read the above given analysis to get an insight of various brodcasters.

DON’T:
1) Get bothered by MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 details. MPEG-4 is considered better than MPEG-2 because of availability of more bandwidth. This means, more channels from the same transponder or more data being sent. Ofcourse, MPEG-4 is better but as an end user, it doesn’t affect you much. The early players in this domian are already in process of shifting to MPEG-4. So, this should not be the criteria for buying a connection.

2) Get bothered by multiple channels per screen. Multiple Channels (8/12 channels per screen) are nothing but mosaic descriptors. This should be your least consideration. How many times will you see 12 programs on one screen ending up confusing yourselves. This feature is given to find quickly about the programmes on various channels in visual format. More number of channels per screen doesn’t help much.

3) Get bothered by the number of features being published by broadcasters. These are just mrketing gimmicks. All the broadcasters in Indian market today are offering almost same features. Just that they are marketing it under different names. In short, Every broadcaster will provide the features of EPG, Reminders, Favourite Lists, Multiple channels per screen, Picture in Guide, Parental Control, Broadcaster specific channels generally for movies, Channel Banner/Mini Guide, etc etc.

In a nutshell, I’ll suggest you to look at the performance of the Set Top Box and don’t go by marketing gimmicks as the Sprite advert says “Dikhawe pe mat jao, apni akal lagao”.

Please don’t consider this post as biased. I am giving a very neutral picture of all the broadcasters.

And here I leave you with the Airtel Digital TV Launch commercial

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Quote of the Day:Morpheus: If real is what you can feel, smell, taste and see, then 'real' is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain

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