Did Times Global Broadcasting make a strategic mistake by not investing in the Direct-to-Home (DTH) platforms for distributing its business channel ET NOW? Should it have been on Tata Sky? (To be fair, ET NOW is available on Bharti’s DTH platform which has signed up about a million subscribers.)

This is not a free campaign for Tata Sky, but the issue of ET NOW’s distribution (or lack of it) is currently being discussed among television industry professionals. Let’s look at it this way: Tata Sky, viewed as a premium brand, is used\seen by consumers who matter (read the top-end customers including company heads and media planners who take a call on advertising spends). To be sure, the platform has 3.7 million customers. Of these, 70 per cent are in the SEC A category. It is fair to assume that an English language business channel would target that community. Interestingly, in case of business channels, the viewer is also the advertiser.

So would it have made more sense for ET NOW to have launched on Tata Sky first rather than spend crores of rupees (estimates oscillate between Rs 60 and Rs 90 crore) on India’s cable TV networks? After all, beaming the channel via Tata Sky would have been cheaper (any where between Rs 5 crore and Rs 8 crore a year) and it would have been seen in the right circles.
Today the channel is suffering from poor distribution, and, therefore, low viewership, even though Times Global CEO Chintamani Rao claims that the channel is widely available in Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata and the entire state of Gujarat. However, TAM data for television viewership of English business news channels between July 5 and July 11 do not back that claim. ET NOW’s share among English business news channels was the lowest at 6 per cent which was less than UTVi’s 9 per cent, NDTV Profit’s 14 per cent and CNBC TV18’s mammoth 72 per cent during that week.

There could be many reasons why ET NOW is not on Tata Sky. May be Tata Sky has asked for too much money as carriage fee. Or, as somebody at the DTH company said the other day, it genuinely does not have enough bandwidth to accommodate so many channels. And that it needs to be “fussy” and “choosy” about the new channels it wants to add. They have to make good business sense.

A broadcast industry expert in Mumbai, who is upset about not being able to watch ET NOW at home, however, feels that it could ET NOW’s deliberate strategy: it probably wanted to make the channel popular by taking the cable network route first and generate consumer demand which would then force the DTH companies to accept the channel for free. Of course, in a private conversation Times Global’s Rao said there is no deliberate strategy in not being on most of the DTH platforms including Tata Sky. “These are operational issues and negotiations with the DTH players are on,” he said.

It is probably then a case of who blinks first.