Strategies to Promote TV Viewership in Rural India

A majority of TV viewership is concentrated in rural India. Most of Indian population is still concentrated in rural areas. The rural population has shown a substantial increase in viewership as compared to urban and semi-urban areas. Several campaigns are running to promote new connections.

A major DTH company ran a campaign lasting for 30 days and notched up 5,000 subscribers, in a rural area in Andhra Pradesh. This kind of overwhelming response attempted to dispel the myth that DTH was targeted at only the cosmopolitan viewers living in metros.

For the last few years, all the DTH operators in India have been aggressively marketing their products in non-metro cities. Of the total 134 million TV households in the country, 50% are in the rural areas, as per the figures released by television audience measurement agency TAM Media Research. Also, 30% of the 70 million TV households in rural India do not have access to cable and satellite TV.

The market for digital TV is bigger in rural areas and is growing at a much higher rate than in urban areas. Market leader, Dish TV India, penetrated the rural market early on. It set up a distribution network in small towns and cities to capture the regional market. DTH price in India depends on the picture quality, technology used, duration of the package, and other factors. It began in the year 2000 when the government gave approval to DTH services in the country. The cost of a DTH license was $2.14 million and the operator also had to pay 10% of its gross revenue as an annual license fee to the government.

There are six players in the market with a combined subscriber base of around 20 million and nearly 1 million new subscribers signing up every month. It began in the year 2000 when the government gave approval to DTH services in the country. The cost of a DTH license was $2.14 million and the operator also had to pay 10% of its gross revenue as an annual license fee to the government. Besides Dish TV, Tata Sky, Airtel Digital TV, there’s Sun Direct, which has primarily concentrated on the DTH market in the south. Interestingly, all of them have a broadcasting/entertainment business or a telecom company, the benefits of which are being leveraged to the maximum.