Subscribers back on the DTH pitch, all thanks to IPL

The direct-to-home (DTH) industry has successfully countered subscriber churn by attracting new users, driven by the Indian Premier League (IPL) T20 cricket tournament, which started on March 31, top industry executives said. The final is to be held on Monday.
Gopal Vittal, MD and CEO of Bharti Airtel, said the DTH business saw strong net additions in April and May. He also stated that the company's strategy of aggregating all video content with broadband has paid rich dividends for the company.

"Cricket, as you know, has an impact on DTH, and if you strip the cricket viewers out of the customer base, which we do now on a very scientific basis, this results in the core business looking strong or looking better," Vittal said during the company's fourth-quarter earnings call on May 17. He said Airtel expects this to play out in the quarter.

The industry has added an estimated 300,000 subscribers because of IPL, experts said.

"The industry has managed to arrest the decline in subscriber base in the last two months, primarily due to IPL," said the CEO of a DTH company who didn't want to be identified. "The industry may have added 300,000 subscribers in the last two months. We have to wait to see if this momentum continues."


Tariff Hike to Help
Others have made changes in strategy to arrest the decline.

Zee Entertainment Enterprises Ltd (ZEEL) MD and CEO Punit Goenka announced on the company's fourth-quarter earnings call that the decline in DTH subscription revenue had been halted.

He said the collective decision to withdraw Hindi general entertainment channels from the government-owned DD Free Dish was aimed at preventing pay subscribers from migrating to that platform. This strategic move was implemented to safeguard the broadcaster's subscription base, he said.

"We have managed to arrest the decline in pay-TV revenues, particularly from DTH due to FTA (free-to-air) withdrawal," he said. "However, the growth that we expected has yet to come in. We have to look at the decision from the medium to long term rather than from a one-year aspect."

To be sure, according to the FICCI-EY 2023 report, TV subscription revenue declined for the third year in a row as the pay TV universe saw a decline of five million homes and consumer-end ARPUs (average revenue per user) remained stagnant.

Rating agency Crisil noted recently that the tariff hike undertaken by DTH operators following the implementation of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India's (Trai's) New Tariff Order (NTO) 3.0 will lead to a 6-8% growth in their revenue to ₹19,500 crore in fiscal 2024, which is roughly 95% of the pre-pandemic revenue in fiscal 2020.