Bharti Airtel gets DTH licence; to invest Rs. 150 cr

New Delhi, Sept. 23 (PTI): Bharti Airtel today said it has got licence to start Direct-To-Home services in the country and announced an investment of Rs 150 crores in the first phase to launch nation-wide operations, a move that would bring in much required competition in the DTH segment.
"We have received the licence and plan to launch pan-India services by the first quarter of next financial year," N Arjun, head of DTH operations, Bharti Airtel, told PTI.
Company officials said Bharti would be investing Rs 150 crore in the initial phase on infrastructure for which its has chosen Tendberg Television, a subsidiary of Sweedish telecom equipment major Ericsson.
Bharti Telemedia, a subsidiary of Bharti Airtel, handling DTH operations, will use a range of Tandberg Television's solutions including the iSIS 8000 IP head-end and MPEG-4 AVC standard definition encoders, Arjun said.
The system is one of the first and finest satellite DTH platforms in the world enabling increasing transponder capacity and potentially doubling the amount of available channels, he said.
The DTH services will be launched nationally across India and Bharti is setting up a state-of-the-art infrastructure near Gurgaon (Haryana) for the purpose of uplinking and broadcast.
By using the latest MPEG-4AVC video compression, and IP tenchnologies, Bharti can cost-effectively deliver more channels in less bandwidth, while still maintaining high quality pictures, officials said.

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