Engineer's Finance

I recently paid Rs. 210 to my cable television operator. I am not happy with the quality of the transmission. Most of the channels transmit digital signals and it is supposed to be better than the analog signals and quality of the output must have been better but it is not so at my place. I was not happy with that and I complained the same to my operator and he advised me to change the ten years old television. I was not happy with the suggestion. So I thought of changing the service provider.

I did a search and found the various Direct To Home Service providers. Here is the list in alphabetical order:

1. Airtel DTH
2. Big TV
3. Dish TV
4. Sun Direct
5. Tata Sky

These are the big names which I could find and I was surprised to see that most of the people complain about the services provided by one or the other. I did little bit of back ground study on each of them. It took a whole four hours doing this analysis and writing this post. Hope it is useful to you people.

These five service providers charge around 1.5k to 2.5k for installation and their set top box costs around 1,000. Most of the channels are paid channels and there is no offer from anyone. The package idea seems kind of weird to me. I like the idea of choosing the individual channels and not the bundle and every other service provider provides the packages and this is their strategy to push the unwanted channels to the customers.

I wanted only few channels and when I checked in all service providers it costs me around Rs. 350. This clearly shows me that I should not go for the DTH service. I was thinking that the competition between the players will be beneficial for the customers but in this case, the customer is a bakra only.

No matter what I choose the package starts around Rs. 100 and those channels are never watched by me. The package is huge it is bundled like crazy. The channels that are bundled are not so very good. I really don’t know whether customers are really happy with such an offering. I guess they must be else they would have complained and things would seem better.

My Pick: As long as there is no problem, every service provider is great. Once you encounter a problem, all the providers are almost the same. There is no much difference in their customer service. This is what I got to know reading various issues reported in the forums. I might be wrong in this as I was looking for issue resolving nature as that was my area of concern. The pricing is not very encouraging. The packages suck. If you choose a package which has 100 channels I am sure only a handful of channels will be watched by you, if that is the case why buy the entire package? Does it make sense? It does not for me.

I prefer programs being packaged rather than channels. It makes more sense to me. It will be interesting to know what people like to watch. Choose a DTH depending on your convenience.