To compete in a multi-faceted video environment, DTH operators must answer this question: How can future growth strategies be adapted to leverage technology that works alongside satellite?
Today’s broadcast market provides a much more complex video environment for traditional satellite pay-TV providers catering to insatiable consumer demands for 3-D and HD content on different screens. It is no secret that video services remain the lifeblood of the satellite industry and that the success of DTH operators around the world fuels the demand for capacity. For operators, the challenge lies in how to combine other technologies with satellite to improve their service offering.
In this executive roundtable brought to you by Via Satellite, key technology decision makers from DTH operators spanning four different continents discuss these technological challenges, as well as where they will be investing in product development.
Taking part in this roundtable: Vivek Khemka, vice president of consumer technology, Dish Network (United States); Rajiv Khattar, president of projects, Dish TV (India); Martin Lewerth, CTO, Modern Times Group (Scandinavia); Oleg Kolesnikov, technical director, NTV+ (Russia); and Mark Billinge, vice president, broadcast operations and technology, OSN (Middle East).
VIA SATELLITE: What are the most important technological decisions your companies have to make during the next year?
Khemka: I think one of the things we are going to be rolling out in the next 12 months is the ability to share recordings and live HDTV across multiple locations in the same home. That is a core table stakes feature at this point. Beyond that, most of our boxes are hybrid boxes in the sense that they can get satellite and Internet delivered content. What we are working on is building out the Internet delivery to satellite boxes of content that complements the content we deliver on a linear basis via satellite.
Khattar: DishTV is looking to add more HD channels as part of its consumer offerings, thus Dish TV is always looking for technologies that offer efficient use of bandwidth. We intend to launch another 15 to 16 HD channels in the next month or so. Another thing that will impact DTH operators in this country is that all of the other operators apart from Dish are working on a single satellite, which is a big risk. This impacted one of the other players in our market and they had to migrate services to another satellite, which caused a lot of consumer agony. By being on two satellites, Dish has built in a satellite redundancy for its operations and we are working with other players to offer them the redundancy in case of a disaster. Unfortunately, ARPUs in our market are very low and it is expensive for the operators to build redundancies at all levels. DishTV has spread its risk across two satellites, so we are quite safe.
Lewerth: Our strategy is to extend our linear free and pay-TV business models online and we will offer our various OTT initiatives to both existing satellite pay-TV subscribers, as well as new customers that, for various reasons, do not have a relationship with us today. We will be device agnostic. Our ambition is to offer our services across any end-user device.
Kolesnikov: In general, the main thing we see is convergence and the way we are delivering services today. We are trying to be everywhere — on satellite, cable, Internet, OTT, etc. We are looking at developing IPTV distribution as well as some cable distribution. These are the major things we are working on in terms of improving our distribution.
Billinge: One of our next immediate projects is that we are moving to MPEG4 DVB-S2 across all of our capacity. We can do that on the back of the set-top box swap, which took place last year during a major project to secure the platform. This resulted in a new Conditional Access system being introduced, coupled with that set-top box swap. All the DTH bases now have an MPEG4 set-top box. The vast majority of these boxes are HD ready. The natural roadmap of the platform is to take advantage of that, and make more use of our current capacity. This means that we are going to MPEG4 across our entire platform, which will enable us to launch additional HD channels without incurring the expense of additional capacity and disrupting too many of our paying subscribers.
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