Mumbai: As the new season of Indian Premier League (IPL) has started, the time of celebration where the fans unite in front of the TV screens has prompted DTH operators to gear up for the exercise to retain and mope up their subscriber base under the New Tariff regime that has altered the distribution ecosystem to greater extent.
To take advantage of this season, DTH providers have lined-up best plans and schemes. Primarily they have increased their reach by targeting regional users with their latest offers.
DTH operators like Tata Sky, Airtel Digital TV and D2h are providing free sports channels to the subscribers in this cricket season.
Tata Sky has offered the language feeds of Star Sports channels to its subscribers to cheer them up during this IPL season. It has extended Star Sports 1 Hindi, Star Sports 1 Tamil, Star Sports 1 Telugu, Star Sports 1 Kannada, and Start Sports 1 Bangla channels at no additional cost from March 23, 2019, to May 19, 2019.
By introducing this move, Tata Sky has made a very popular sports channel available in almost all major regional languages at free of cost. Also, these channels will be live on the subscribers’ accounts till the IPL season and they will be taken off on May 20, 2019, midnight.
Keeping in mind the IPL season, Tata Sky has also launched a Family Sports HD pack which costs Rs 646 per month, and it will avail 96 channels to the subscribers including all sports channels from Star, Sony and more. The SD variant of the same pack has been priced at Rs 456.
Following in the footsteps of Tata Sky, Airtel Digital TV has also announced that it will be providing free preview channels for existing users and new users in the IPL season. New DTH connection buyers of Airtel will get to enjoy complimentary Star Sports 1 and Star Sports 1 Hindi till May 19, 2019. However, later Airtel Digital TV also informed that existing users would get additional channels which would include Star Sports 1, Star Sports 1 HD, Star, Sports 1 Hindi, Star Sports 1 Hindi HD, Star Sports 1 Telugu, Star Sports 1 Tamil, Star, Sports 1 Kannada and Star Sports 1 Bangla.
On similar lines, although D2h has not introduced free preview channels for its subscribers, it has added a total of four new language feeds for Star Sports 2. These feeds will avail Star Sports 2 in Hindi, English, Tamil, Kannada and Bangla thus increasing the reach of the DTH provider.
