India’s DTH players benefit from digital switch

A report from Singapore’s Media Partners Asia (MPA) states that India’s seven DTH operators will benefit from the nation’s switch from analogue to digital TV.

According to Advanced Television, MPA’s report suggests that revenues for DTH operators can be expected to treble to over $5 billion by 2020 as the terrestrial cable TV digitisation schemes would help the DTH players expand their own subscriber bases.

MPA says that DTH industry’s revenues will expand to $3.9 billion by 2017 and $5.3 billion by 2020 on the back of this growth in subscriber numbers and ARPU expansion. MPA says that the India’s DTH players saw revenues of about $1.5 billion last year.

MPA adds that DTH subscribers will grow from 32.4 million in 2012 to 63.8 million by 2017 and 76.6 million by 2020. The figure for 2011 stood at 28.7 million.

However, the MPA report says that last year’s net increase in 2012 over 2011 was a mere 3.7 million which “is alarming” it states.