Mumbai: Dish TV will send out software upgrades to its 4 million subscribers in order to enable them to install apps for watching Internet content on their TV by December. The software upgrade will be available to those users who have purchased the recent models of Dish TV’s STBs that support this feature.
As of now about 4 million out of the total 22 million customers have such boxes, these boxes can often be identified by the presence of an ethernet port.
“There are almost 4 million boxes that we have which we can convert into connected boxes which we are planning to do in this quarter,” said Anil Dua, CEO of Dish TV India Ltd, which runs DTH services under D2h, Zing and Dish TV brands across the country.
“We are going to leverage our existing boxes, already active in the market and provide them, enable them to watch internet content as well,” he added.
He also said that the new service will be “very affordable and very attractive”. The exact prices will be announced only at launch, he said.
“The consumer will have the best of both the worlds getting connected with the Hybrid box and the DTH platform at the same time, keeping the cost low and giving excellent value for money,” Dua added.
Users will have to connect their set-top-boxes to the Internet, either using an ethernet cable or possibly, using a wifi dongle that can be plugged into the device — depending on what kind of software update is pushed out.
The move is in keeping with similar moves by competitors like Tata Sky, which has announced that it will enable users to install third-party apps like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video on their Tata Sky boxes.
Dua, however, did not clarify what kind of apps will be allowed on Dish TV’s boxes.
It is quite possible that the company may not support a large number of apps, and will instead provide only a handful, or even a single, app that can be installed, though which it will channel all videos.
