Direct-to-Home (DTH) majors including Dish (Essel Group) Tata Sky, Bharti Airtel, Reliance, and Sun are feverishly rescripting their business plans to implement a remarkable bottom-of-the-pyramid success story. This unfolding story rests on the writ of an estimated 150 million rural homes. As rural consumers become the centre of attraction, DTH companies are pushing the envelope to woo them in style. This in turn has led to a fierce battle for the last-mile connectivity.

Ajay Puri, chief executive officer, Bharti Airtel, says, “The entire maths is up for review. Traditional wisdom pegged the size of the DTH business at about 50 million homes, calculated as the difference between total television homes (130 million) and the cable and satellite homes (80 million). But we have all just realised that the real big DTH opportunity lies with an estimated 95 million homes waiting to experience empowering technology and content on offer. These (95 million) are homes that are at present in the process of owning their first television set.” Salil Kapoor, chief operating officer, Dish TV, the market leader at present, agrees. “It is a grand bottom-of-the-pyramid success story in the making. Demand for DTH connections has been steadily growing, despite the economic slowdown. We have seen business grow more than 40 per cent in the past few months,” he says. At least one-third of Dish TV’s customers live in rural areas and they haven’t stopped buying Dish TV connections because they haven’t fallen into the equated monthly installment (EMI) trap, he adds.

Vikram Mehra, chief marketing officer, Tata Sky, says the deep rural DTH penetration has emerged as the big game changer. “DTH has emerged as a great leveler. We began as a top metro player but saw the writing on the wall. We realised the urban and the rural consumer have the same perspective. The perspective of value between the two thoughts is different. We see this as both a challenge and an opportunity.” Media Partners Asia (MPA), an international media research agency, says almost a third of new subscribers (for DTH and digital cable) in Asia will come from India by December this year. At present, India has about 14 million DTH consumers with 70 per cent of them in the rural belt. India has 225 million homes out of which only 130 million are television homes and of these only 80 million have any cable connection. The remaining about 95 million are waiting to log on to the big TV story.

Tapping this huge mass of 95 million consumers has led to interesting action on the ground — from a village with a mere 600 population in deep Uttar Pradesh to remote parts of tribal northeast and interiors of Maharashtra and down South, DTH has emerged as the big connect.