KOLKATA: With digital television (DTV) and digitisation, household penetration is increasing in the country. “There exists tremendous opportunities for cable broadband and over-the-top (OTT) services”, opines Broadcom India managing director Rajiv Kapur.
“The over-the-top television market may still be in its infancy in India, but it holds much promise for the future. The demand for OTT is going up. There are progressive operators who have been talking about value-added services. Internet entertainment on TV is on the rise,” says Kapur.
Looking ahead, “one can see existing television sets transformed into smart TVs, enabling internet applications everywhere in the home,” adds Kapur. “We are expanding the options for entertainment in the home. We are revolutionizing television by providing a full-range of platform solutions for content-sharing and video streaming throughout the home,” he further informs.
Broadcom’s video and broadband solutions enables service providers offer a high-quality, TV-watching experience to its subscribers along with high-speed internet browsing.
He went on to explain Broadcom’s role in OTT and broadband services through Set Top Boxes (STBs). Kapur says that the company constantly educates and trains various operators on the OTT services.
India is currently witnessing the digitisation of analog cable TV signals as mandated by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (I&B). With digitisation, analog cable subscribers have been also migrating largely to digital cable, which has gained about 10 million subscribers in 2013, while net DTH subscribers increased by approximately three million.
Post digitisation, while the viewing experience and expectations of the subscribers are soaring, it has also increased the demand for high-speed broadband.
As per the Cisco Visual Networking Index 2014, in India, mobile data traffic will grow by a colossal 24-fold from 2013 to 2018, a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 88 per cent and Internet-Video-to-TV traffic will increase 8-fold between 2013 and 2018 (50.9 per cent CAGR).
“Consumers are now more acutely aware about the content on their portable devices and the TV”, he further adds.
As the users evolve with digital content streamed to them, the demand for OTT services increases.
It should also be noted that in a report borne out by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) survey, it forecasts 176 million OTT viewers by 2015 generating revenues of $552 million.
Moreover, Morgan Stanley, a multinational financial services company, projects in its report that mobile data subscribers in India are likely to grow on an average by 25 per cent every year to reach 519 million by fiscal 2018, driven by falling handset prices and rise in smart phone usage and penetration.
‘With Wi-Fi internet access, end-users are looking for enhanced ways to communicate with large format screens too,” S Rajagopalan, a media analyst opines.
"With this, users can also use Smart TV, though the interface is not user-friendly. The manufacturer, therefore, has to innovate with the interface, such as Flex Smartphone or Bluetooth / Wi-Fi-enabled keyboard to be integrated, which will grab the attention of the end-user. Maybe over a period of time, Smart TV will be preferred by the end-user to laptops, which will lead to more speed and bandwidth in the broadband segment," concludes Rajagopalan.
