The MDU is a customized DTH solution targeted to tap various sections of housing societies, commercial complexes and new townships where a single dish antenna can provide the DTH connection to multiple households. This circumvents the need for installing individual dish antennas for every household connection.

BIG TV has already bagged 1 million subscribers in a short span of 90 days and now plans to drive large group deals in residential clusters, hospitality businesses and business parks through the MDU installations. The company is targeting a market share of 40% per cent in the MDU segment within the first year of operations.

According to Mahesh Prasad, President – Reliance Communications, “MDUs are a natural extension of a DTH service. Our MDU service offers a perfect solution to residential complexes which are not too keen to have too many dish antennas peeking out of balconies and where the Line of Sight to the satellite is not very clear. As part of our marketing and sales strategy, the MDU service will help generate volumes in residential clusters.”

Big TV will provide the MDU connection to the entire residential complex through a single large dish antenna linked to individual Set Top Boxes (STBs) in various households within the premises.  The MDU dish size varies between 90 cms and 120 cms depending on the number of households it services. The cost of hardware will be borne by BIG TV. Each household participating in the scheme gets one STB as a part of BIG TV’s MDU scheme.

Despite the common dish antenna being installed, each household will have the freedom to choose their own channel package including the free regional pack offered with the inaugural channel pack. Subscribers will also have the option of opting for any of the various entry offers that are available for them to choose from.

As part of its aggressive push to generate MDU volumes, BIG TV has set-up a dedicated pan-India network of 350 direct sales agents and 500 member installation team to handle MDU business. BIG TV has already installed MDUs at over 1,500 locations and close to 4,000 locations are in the installation process.

The company has also kicked off a series of road shows across India as part of its marketing efforts to generate awareness and drive subscription sales in these markets.

With this the company has bagged market share of 15 per cent in just 3 months in the fast-evolving Indian DTH sector, which is nearly 60 months old in India.

The company attributes the achievement to the faith of millions of Indian consumers in the Reliance brand. “Our customer-centric approach coupled with advanced technology, superior product and service with a wide distribution and installation service network spanning the country helped Big TV cross the million milestone in such a short span of time,” Mahesh Prasad, President, Reliance Communications, said.

Big TV has, in the meantime, brought in a slew of user–friendly features to enhance the overall viewing experience . This includes the state of the art graphical user interface and Electronic Program Guide (EPG).

Claiming to be the country’s first fully digital home entertainment service using MPEG-4 platform on a national scale, BIG TV runs on an advanced MPEG4 DTH technology platform that enables it to offer over 200 TV, cinema and audio channels. This incidentally is said to be the highest by any DTH operator in the country. As many as 32 movie channels in English, Hindi and regional languages makes it possible for the Big TV customer to choose from 600 new movies every year, the company said.

Adding that the country’s largest on-ground infrastructure for a home entertainment has been created by Big TV, it said that the infrastructure would enable the company to serve over millions of new customers every year and offer multiple price points and packaging offers to suit needs of all customer segments.

Beside, the state-of-the-art customer service mechanism has been fully functional and ready to serve its increasing customer base every day in 11 Indian languages.

Reliance Big TV’s major competirors in India are Tata Sky and Zee Group owned DishTV. Another recent entrant to the fray is Bharti Airtel with its Airtel Digital TV.