Bharti Airtel to launch IPTV and DTH
September 17, 2008
Bharti Airtel, India’s leading telecom company, has reported that it intends to launch its IPTV and DTH services before the end of the year.
“We have “We have been conducting IPTV trials in a thousand households in Gurgaon and our strategy is to deliberately go slow, rolling out in the NCR region first in a phased manner and then targeting the other top six cities in the country,” said Atul Bindal, president, Airtel Telemedia Services.
“A trial launch of the DTH services has also been done amongst our employees and the feedback has been very good. We have retail outlets across India through which we sell prepaid, post-paid, and value-added service offerings and we are looking at leveraging this network for our DTH service,” he added.
The two services will have differential pricing. The rates offered by Airtel for its DTH service will be similar to those of existing DTH operators. On the other hand, IPTV strategy is to target the top seven cities in the country making a triple play proposition. IPTV will be targeted at top-end users and customers outside this ambit will be the targeted for DTH.