NEW DELHI: Airtel Digital TV, the DTH service from Bharti Airtel, today said that it has crossed the milestone of five million subscribers.
Coming in as the fifth operator in the highly competetive Indian DTH market, Airtel Digital TV is the fastest to reach to the mark.
It has been leading industry additions with over 2.8 million customers already in the first 10 months of FY 2010-11. The company claims that the achievement in just 21 months of full scale national operations is the fastest anywhere in the world.
The DTH operator has over 5.1 million customers, as on 31 January 2011.
Airtel Digital TV said that it is available in areas covered by over 21,000 of the country’s approximately 27,000 pin codes. Over 70 per cent of its customers today are coming in from towns with a population less than 100,000. This has made Airtel Digital TV the clear leader in share of new customers’ addition every month in 10 of the 19 state clusters in the country.
Bharti Airtel director and CEO-DTH services Ajai Puri said, “The 5 million customer milestone is a significant step in our journey of making Airtel the most preferred choice of customers on all three screens - Mobile, PC and TV. While on the one hand, we made a conscious decision to invest in the latest MPEG4 DVBS 2 technology and created industry leading partnerships for content and service delivery, the power of brand Airtel and its distribution reach enabled us to get immediate access to a large retail base.
"In doing so, we have consistently garnered a larger share of the category over the last six quarters, thereby gaining critical scale in short time. We are now well placed to realise our vision of becoming the most preferred brand for customers in the DTH category."
As per the company Maharashtra, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal and the North East are emerging as its biggest markets.
It also said that over 15 per cent of new customer additions for Airtel Digital TV over the last quarter in top metro markets have been coming through the HD platform.
