Not Wedded To The Satellite: Tata Sky To Begin Offering Netflix, Hotstar, Youtube And Amazon Prime

In an interaction with Mint, Tata Sky managing director and chief executive officer Harit Nagpal has talked about the company’s plans to begin offering digital content services like Netflix, Hotstar, Youtube and Amazon Prime to its customers.

The company saw a rating upgrade by Crisil at the back of strong performance in the last financial year that ended March 2018 and plans to diversify its content base beyond just satellite TV offerings. The company has reported a net profit of Rs 408 crore in the last financial year, as opposed to Rs 8 crore in the previous one.

The company plans to offer the new services through the introduction of a new hardware box that can stream content from satellite as well as broadband.

Contrasting the Indian and American market, Nagpal said that cable television does not face the same level of competition from Over The Top (OTT) services like Netflix due to lower cable prices in India. He expressed confidence that India will always be an ‘and’ market and never an ‘or’ market like the United States where most people have switched to OTTs completely.

He said that the new boxes will allow the people to watch live TV via satellite and switch to OTTs via broadband whenever they wish to. The box will receive signals from both sources. Tata Sky had earlier announced a tie-up with Netflix for its services.

He also said that Tata Sky is operating in a revenue range of Rs 6,000 crore and is adding 15-20 per cent subscribers every year resulting in the strong financial performance.