Airtel launches its DTH Service

Bharti Airtel, which is slated to launch its direct-to-home (DTH) service - Airtel Digital TV on 9th October 2008, will be doing it in Bollywood style.

While Bharti has unleashed its teaser campaign, full blown promotions will commence with Bollywood actors like Saif Ali Khan, Kareena Kapoor, Vidya Balan, R Madhavan, AR Rahman and cricketers like Gautam Gambhir and Zaheer Khan.

It may be recalled that Vidya Balan and R Madhavan have been featured in Airtel ads, whereas Rahman has given the signature tune for the mobile service provider. Incidentally Shah Rukh Khan, who is the brand ambassador of Airtel mobile, also happens to endorse a rival DTH serivce provider - DishTV and hence his involvement with Airtel Digital TV is unlikely.

The Airtel Digital TV teaser campaign has been doing its television rounds and was also in print today with the tagline - See you at home. Soon. The TV campaigns have been conceptulised by JWT and directed by Abhinay Deo of Ramesh Deo Productions. At the time of filing this story, Deo was not available for comment.

JWT is planning an aggressive ad campaign roll out for Airtel Digital TV keeping in mind overall strategic insights, creative thinking, customer focus and understanding and a 360 execution of the core creative thought through traditional and non-traditional mediums of communication.

Airtel Digital TV service will be available to customers through 21,000 retail points including Airtel Relationship Centres in 62 cities across the country. The service will launch with 175+ channels, the packages will start from Rs. 2499 for a six-month subscription in which the channel price band will range from Rs. 99 to Rs. 424.

Airtel digital TV will have the latest MPEG4 standard with DVB S2 technology, which translates into exceptional picture clarity and consistent high quality audio for the customer. This technology also enables delivery of more complex interactive content and is High Definition (HD) ready. Additionally, Airtel Digital TV uses 20 per cent larger dish antenna that offers better performance during rain.

Airtel's USP is that its services will work during cloudy weather and an universal remote for both the set top box and TV. The service is backed by a 24x7 customer care in eight languages and a team of 800 professionally trained service engineers. Airtel Digital TV also boasts of high set top box memory for new interactive applications such as iMatinee (cinema ticketbooking), iTravel (browse and book travel packages), iShop (tele-shopping), iCity (city information guide) and Widgets (stocks) along with eight screen iNews and iSports with 2/4 screens. Apart from this, other features such as Worldspace Radio content, new games every six weeks and on screen account meter are packaged with the Digital TV.

Airtel has to show difference in their product and services to stand strong amongst existing DTH segment players like Tata Sky, Zee Dish TV, Sun Direct DTH and Reliance Big TV. The DTH segment in India is slowly firing up and is leading to stiff competition for the local cable TV operators.

The Indian DTH market, which is poised to grow to about Rs 30 billion (Rs 3000 crores) over the next five years, recently saw the launch of Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group's (ADAG) BIG TV. The other players in the space are Tata Sky, DishTV, DD Direct and Sun Direct. Additionally, Videocon is also slated to launch its DTH service by month-end. While SRK endorses DishTV, Aamir Khan was recently appointed as the brand ambassador for Tata Sky.

Compiled By: Saurav Chakraborty