Big TV plans to charge carriage fees from broadcasters

Big TV, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Reliance Communications and an new entrant in the direct-to-home (DTH) segment, is looking at charging carriage fees from small broadcasters.

Currently, Big TV is not charging the broadcasters any carriage fee, which would become a major source of revenue for the company in the near term.

"We will look at charging carriage fees from small broadcasters. We can't carry every channel on our platform, so we are considering charging carriage fees from the upcoming new channels as well as small broadcasters." a senior company official said to Televisionpoint.com.

Carriage fee is paid by television broadcasters to multi-system operators (MSO's) and DTH players to beam their channels on their network.

Big TV had launched its DTH services on August 19 and is looking to capture 40 per cent of the market share within one year. The DTH service would offer 202 channels at present, which would be increased to 300 by the middle of next year.

Big TV is available at Rs 1,490, which would include a three-month complimentary subscription. The service would be available at 1,00,000 retail outlets across 6,500 towns in the country.

At present, Reliance Big TV has eight transponders, which can support 230 channels. The company would acquire four more transponders in next three to four months, which would take its total channels capacity to 360.