The Hindu Business Line : BT Broadcast Services in pact with DTH licencee

BT Broadcast Services (BTBS), the broadcast and media solutions arm of BT, said today it has signed an agreement with ASC Enterprises, licence holder for Direct-to-Home (DTH) operations in India.

The agreement enables European and US broadcasters to tap the 1.5 million forecasted DTH subscriber base in the country by jointly marketing the DTH capacity on its Dish TV satellite broadcasting platform. Besides the Indian subcontinent, this agreement also applies to other English speaking markets in Asia Pacific, BTBS said in a statement here.

Both BTBS and ASC Enterprises will market an end-to-end service that includes 3Mb/s (the Dish TV standard) of capacity on the platform; encryption using Conax conditional access; a Dish TV EPG listing; 24-hour signal quality monitoring from BT Tower; full resilience, with redundant equipment automatically switched into service within 1 second of any failure etc.

The BTBS CEO, Mr Mark Smith, said: "In the past, there have been significant barriers to entry for European and US broadcasters to the exciting and rapidly growing Indian, Australian and Asian English speaking markets, and this new service makes it much easier, and more cost effective, for this to be achieved. BTBS and ASC Enterprises TV have consolidated our international broadcasting capabilities to create a powerful channel to this key global market."

He said set-top boxes or dish packages will be sold to consumers through Zee TV's (ASC's sister concern) 10,000 resellers and revenue collection and subscriber management will be handled by another group company, ASCEL.

Mr Amitabh Kumar, Director-ASC Enterprises, added: "ASC Enterprises is very pleased to be at the forefront of bringing US and European TV channels to satellite TV viewers on the Indian Subcontinent. Our joint offering with BT Broadcast Services presents a fantastic opportunity for global broadcasters to transmit their channels to a new potential audience of 1 billion people."

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