Interview: Harit Nagpal, MD & CEO, Tata Play

DTH service provider Tata Sky recently rebranded to Tata Play. With this, the company is pushing for a greater role in India’s video streaming ecosystem. Harit Nagpal speaks to Venkata Susmita Biswas about the content distribution business, and why DTH companies are well poised to collaborate with online video streaming platforms. Edited excerpts:

Has there been an improvement in business in FY22 over FY21?

Business is not growing at the same rate as it was before the pandemic. And that was expected because the cable or DTH business is a mass market one, and the economy has been under a certain amount of stress for the last two years. The service sector is beginning to see improvement; people are resuming visits to retail outlets, entertainment destinations, etc. As employment comes back in these sectors, money will go back to the villages and subscriptions, too, will return.

Around 37% of TV subscribers use DTH. But this shift to DTH is happening at a slow pace and DD Free Dish is taking off in smaller markets…

We have never looked at DD Free Dish as a competitor. It is, in fact, an opportunity for DTH players. When a person buys a TV in this country by spending a lot of money, we don’t expect them to also take on the burden of a monthly subscription of about Rs 300 every month. If the person instead has access to DD Free Dish, for which one does not have to pay a certain amount every month to access content, then DD Free Dish is a great motivator to buy it in the first place. Once they get used to watching content, they may like to upgrade. Assuming that DD Free Dish has 40-50 million subscribers, if 3-4 million out of these decide to upgrade to pay TV every year, that’s a lot for us.

You introduced Tata Sky Binge, the OTT aggregator service, in 2019. What had prompted this foray?

India has moved from just Doordarshan to cable TV, and now we have about 900 channels and OTT video streaming platforms. Most customers who watch TV also watch video streaming content; they do not just watch one or the other. A majority of India lives with family and consumes content across platforms. That’s when we understood that it was becoming hard for a family that watches TV and OTT platforms to manage multiple subscriptions at the same time. Because we understand content distribution, DTH players are well-suited to aggregate OTT apps. The Binge app is small now, with less than a million subscribers.

This year you launched an OTT plus TV channel bundling service. What is the pricing strategy?

The Binge dashboard does not just list different apps and their prices, it also integrates these apps and lists comedy content in one place, Bengali in another row, and so on. We have taken two years to perfect this platform; now that we have perfected it, we are taking it to the mass market. In addition, using the knowledge of how a family consumes both TV and OTT, we are offering a combined bundle using which people can watch TV and OTT on their television screens, and just OTT on their mobile phones. At Rs 299 per month customers get access to 11 OTT apps or nine apps at Rs 149 per month. The subscriptions to Netflix and Amazon Prime Video come as add-ons at the rate specified by those companies. We give the customer the benefit of having one relationship with all these platforms. Using our app, OTT content can be watched on three television sets and one mobile device simultaneously. Customers can add their television bundles to either of these OTT bundles.

How relevant will an OTT aggregator service be, with smart TVs taking off in India?

Smart TV is an opportunity for us as people can download the Binge app on their smart TVs. We have a DTH box called Tata Play Binge+ which can be connected to a television through just one HDMI port to access both dish antenna and broadband. With this box and the remote that comes with it, consumers can toggle between OTT apps and television with the tap of a button.

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