(2 August 2010 7:35 pm)

BANGALORE: In a bid to grow the number of subscribers from the south, and more specifically from Karnataka, Dish TV today announced a slew of subscription packs that will allow a subscriber to ‘mix and match’ the channels that he or she wants to view and optimise the payout for the DTH service from Dish TV.

The DTH player will also be announcing an Oonam special offer for Kerala tomorrow, said Dish TV COO Salil Kapoor.

Among the four southern states, Karnataka with 30 districts, is unique because Dish TV’s insights from a study indicate that almost every 200 kilometers or so, the language spoken and the consumed content changes. In the other three southern states, it is the local language along one other language content that is consumed.

Karnataka shares a border with Maharashtra in the north and northwest and hence in a number of districts, Marathi is consumed along with Kannada.

In the eastern part of the state, Telugu is consumed in a number of districts that share a boundary with that state, while southern Karnataka shares boundaries with Tamil Nadu and Kerala where Tamil and Malayalam respectively are also consumed. In a number of districts Urdu is also consumed along with Kannada.

According to Dish TV estimates, the current number of DTH subscribers in India are to almost double and grow at the rate of 10 million per year over this fiscal and the next one. The player had earlier announced that it was targeting 2.5 million new subscriptions for the current fiscal.

Currently, the South contributes 22 per cent and Karnataka is about 7 per cent to Dish TV’s subscription base of 7.66 million. Dish TV hopes to grow the numbers from the South to 25 per cent, with an appropriate contribution to the growth from Karnataka.

To that effect, Dishthv has launched 11 different packs with the subscriber having the freedom within each pack to pick between sports and the required regional languages. To attract new subscribers, it is adding additional regional channels within the pack.

It is also offering special packs for cities such as Bangalore, Mangalore and Mysore that consume cosmopolitan content, as well as extra charges of Rs 160 per television for each additional television set in a household.

Dish TV plans to add three customer oriented services across India – that of calling up the customer on receipt of an SMS from the customer; arranging to pick up the monthly subscription payment at the subscriber’s door on receiving an SMS from the subscriber; and it plans to open 80 hubs across India, 25 of them in South India, where the subscriber can walk in and take a replacement of a malfunctioning set top box. Besides the existing call center at Noida, Dish TV also plans to open up a multi-lingual call center in Chennai to service the requirements of the customers in the four southern states.