Bharti Airtel’s reported interest in acquiring Tatas’ 70% stake in direct-to-home operator Tata Play comes amid a broader consolidation within the media and digital services market in India. With Reliance and Disney coming together in a joint venture valued at $8.5 billion in India, the fight for access to premium homes is expected to grow, media experts tracking the market said.
Bharti Telemedia, which runs the DTH business under Airtel Digital TV is the country’s second-largest DTH operator after Tata Play with a market share of 28.45% according to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) for the year ended March 31. Tata Play has a 32.53% share for the period, while Dish TV has a 20.46% share and Sun Direct has an 18.57% market share, Trai data shows.
Acquiring a majority stake in Tata Play is expected to help Airtel push more of its digital services into urban households, something rival Reliance Jio has successfully done over the last few years as a telecom and digital services provider, G Chokkalingam, founder of Mumbai-based Equinomics Research, said.
“Most DTH operators, including Tata Play, Airtel and Dish TV, have increasingly expanded their scope of services to tackle migration of consumers to OTT platforms. For Airtel, the challenge is two-fold because the accent will shift to convergence as Reliance and Disney merge,” Chokkalingam said.
In April this year, Bharti Airtel’s MD and CEO Gopal Vittal said that Airtel DTH had added 388,000 customers, which was the highest net addition for the direct-to-home service in 12 quarters.
This also comes amid a broader decline of 7.6 million DTH subscribers over the last three years, experts said, as streaming majors such as JioCinema, Disney+ Hotstar, Netflix and Amazon Prime Video take consumers away from DTH in urban areas. In rural areas, DD Free Dish, the free DTH platform of Prasar Bharati, has seen a migration of low-end consumers, sector experts said.
DTH players including Airtel, Tata Play and Dish TV have looked to tackle this problem with a combination of smart digital services, OTT aggregation and Android set-top boxes.
Vittal had said in April that revenue growth in DTH was driven by both customer additions and an increase in average revenue per user by pushing more bundled offerings to subscribers. For FY24, Airtel Digital TV’s net loss narrowed to Rs 76 crore in FY24 from Rs 349 crore in FY23. FY24 revenue, meanwhile, touched Rs 3,045 crore from Rs 2,949 crore in FY23, its results showed.
Tackling Disney
While a potential majority acquisition of Tata Play from the Tatas gives Airtel more room to unleash its suite of digital services in premium households, experts say that the company may have to eventually pick up Disney’s 30% stake for full control of the business.
Mails sent to Airtel and Tatas elicited no response till the time of going to press. Text messages to Disney Star on the future of its stake in Tata Play elicited no response at the time of going to press.
Disney inherited the Tata Play stake after its 2019 merger with Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox. It has been looking to exit the media distribution business in India as it remains focused on the merger with Reliance, according to industry sources. Worldwide, Disney has been streamlining operations by cutting costs and keeping its attention on its OTT operations.
From: financialexpress
Financial News
