Asianet to go fully digital in a year

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[TD="class: story"]MUMBAI: Asianet Satellite Communications Ltd, promoted by Rajan Raheja who also controls Hathway Cable & Datacom, has taken the radical decision of switching off its analogue cable TV service within a year and plans to make a fresh investment of Rs 1 billion as it pushes to become India's first multi-system operator (MSO) to offer only digital cable.
For starters, the Kerala-based MSO has just completed converting Trivandrum into a full digital network. Asianet is offering its Trivandrum subscribers five bouquet options up to 150 channels and plans to upgrade this to 220 channels within three months.
"We have become the first cable TV service provider in India to achieve this milestone, well ahead of the national government's full digitisation mandate by December 2014. We have 75,000 direct subscribers in Trivandrum and our target is to completely digitise our network in Kerala within nine months," said Asianet Satellite Communications president and COO Sankaranarayana.
Asianet has already invested Rs 1 billion towards digitisation and seeded 350,000 set-top boxes. The net-breakeven regional MSO has 615,000 direct subscribers.[/TD]
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[TD="class: story"]"We will be investing Rs 1 billion within a year. We will require Rs 750 million to digitise our direct subscribers. We are also looking at doing some amount of digitisation for secondary subscribers," said Sankaranaryana.
Asianet offers the digital set-top boxes free. "We are subsidising the STBs. We believe our pay channel content cost will come down. The ARPU (average revenue per user) for digital is Rs 200 while in case of analogue is Rs 150," averred Sankaranaryana.
Asianet, which was in talks with US private equity giant Providence for diluting a minority stake in 2007, is not looking at offloading any equity now. "We are not in talks with any private equity firm. We have decided to digitise our network on our own. We have access to vendor financing and debt. We have a healthy Ebitda because we own the last mile," said Sankaranaryana.
Kerala's dominant MSO has a technical tie up with Cisco for digitisation. "Digitisation will also help us in further improving our broadband services," said Sankaranaryana.[/TD]
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[TD="class: story"]Asianet has launched high definition service. "We offer Movies Now and MTunes and are in talks with other broadcasters for HD content. We have 2000 HD customers," said Sankaranaryana.
Asianet Satellite communications also operates the cable channels ACV, Rosebowl, Jukebox, Jukebox Plus and Medley.
"We are planning to launch movie-on-demand, games and other value-added services soon," said Sankaranaryana.
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Hope Hathway does not go compulsory set top box .. digital route!!I have four TV connections (one in each (3)bedroom +living room)@ rs 300 thro my cablewallah. He gets signal thro hathway! ende kartave!

MAN! how do thay get so much money when the ARPU (average revenue per user) is Rs200!!?
they themselves said they have 75000customers

"We have 2000 HD customers". I know a person in TVM, who has paid 10k and took the HD box. I have also seen another person in this forum with an ADTV HD connection. I assume rest 1998 customers are ADTV employees who are getting it free of cost. Else who will be ready to pay 10k for the ADTV HD DVR and stuck up with 2 HD channels, where D2H is offering DVR for less than 4k, with 9 HD channels.

10K for a HD set top box? where are we? in 1988?

a friend of mine working in ACV has said the rate of HDDVR boxes will come done in the coming month as they add more hd channel. with in two to three months they are going to add about 70 more channels also

Hd dvr box price:7500 and one year subscription 2500(150 channel package + hd channels) = 10000

lets wait and watch. I hope SS and ESPN will be part of thier 70 additions...

i think their is a chance of Zee group channel coming back on Asianet Digital in 70 new channels

any updates?

they have added a new freq at channel 900 which is now showing no signal in the coming day they will sure add more freq to add new channels about 4 to 5 freq is require to add about 60 to 70 channel lets wait and watch,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

Channels added after 1 year...........