Those are the winds of change slowly blowing over India's Television Industry and they seem to be saying - DTH (Direct To Home) Television.

With the Zee owned DISH TV already on air now for almost 10 months and adding about 3000 new subscribers a day things are only going to get more interesting. The TATA STAR group Joint Venture TATASKY is scheduled to take off mid 2006. Slowly and steadily the cable operators are going to be nudged out. It will take a little time, according to Hong Kong-based media research firm Media Partners Asia (MPA), India is set to emerge as Asia's leading revenue generating pay-TV market by 2015 with multi-channel video industry (cable, DTH and IPTV) turnover growing from $3.6 billion in 2005 to $7.2 billion by 2010 and $10.5 billion by 2015.

SONY Entertainment the only major channel in the Top 3 slots today, seems to be keeping its options open with regards to DTH. Whether they join an existing platform or start one of their own it's anybody's guess.

The one thing to note here is that because the TRAI regulations don't seem to be clear on the matter of cross platform broadcast where each major network must also be available on all the services, the danger is that to watch all the available channels people will end up with 2 or 3 set top boxes or satellite receivers. That is a road the industry should avoid going down because it will fragment the market too much. I guess only when the other players move in and the market evolves these things will get sorted out. In the short to medium term though get ready to be bombarded with "special deals" and "high tech features" that the DTH players will no doubt shout about.

I remember it was in the early 90's when Satellite Television first arrived the one community that breathed a sigh of relief was the ad filmmakers. They after all toiled to get the perfect shot and the perfect picture only to be played out on a very snowy looking Doordarshan at that time. Ouch! That used to hurt. The crystal clear images from space fixed all that and now the Indian Television, which is experiencing nothing short of its next revolution will bring the advertising industry in India a whole new way to communicate with the viewers. Imagine you are watching a commercial for say A Cruise Holiday and a red button graphic pops up in the corner of the TV screen. You click the red button on the remote. Which promptly "tells" the Cruise Holiday Company that you are interested in going on holiday with them. They then call you right away and book your holiday for you.You see most of the Set Top Boxes now can connect to the Internet via a built in modem. So the now with DTH the circle is complete. The TV up until now was a one-way street i.e. you the viewer could not interact back with what you saw on TV.

Well soon you will be able to. The TV will now become an extremely potent point of sale in Indian households like it has been in European and US ones.

The winner here will be the viewer. An excellent combination of feature rich Interactive services, like Movie on Demand, Personal Video Recording real-time Electronic Programme Guides plus good value pricing will hopefully help DTH make inroads faster into the Indian market.

Can't Wait!