(28 December 2010 2:00 pm)

MUMBAI: Dish TV, the leading direct-to-home (DTH) service provider company has signed up a long term contract for additional transponders on Asiasat with ‘Antriksh’.

With this deal, the total transmission bandwidth of Dish TV has increased from 432 MHz to 648MHz. The new transponders are closely located to the current transponders allowing channels beamed from it to be available to existing customers as well.

The increased transponder capacity will enable Dish TV to increase its standard definition channel capacity to over 320 channels and high definition (HD) capacity to over 30 channels, substantially higher than any competing DTH operator.

Dish TV MD Jawahar Goel said, “The addition of significant channel capacity in both HD and SD is expected to considerably enhance our offering to subscribers. We will be able to offer region specific content, enhanced VAS, as well as a substantially enhanced HD bouquet, driving growth of HD services.”

Dish TV CEO RC Venkateish added, “With the dramatically increased capacity we will be able to offer the widest HD services in the country enabling us to tap into the high income group of subscribers in major metros and cities. We will also be able to significantly enhance our suite of value added services apart from being able to provide localized and region specific content. We expect this to translate into significant gains in terms of ARPU as well as total revenue for the company. Apart from this the overall width of our bouquet in terms of number of channels will be 25-30 per cent higher than any other DTH platform in India, giving us a significant competitive advantage in the marketplace.”