India’s Dish TV, a local company with nothing in common with Dish Network in the US, has said that it will use ST Micro chips for its next generation of set tops to support both SD and HD content. We understand that the set tops themselves are made locally but rely heavily on the SoC.
ST runs both Sigma and Broadcom close in the global set top stakes and both the STi5189 SD decoder and the STi7111 HD set-top-box decoder chips will be used. Dish has already said it will ship 60,000 HD boxes this year, and is picking up new customers at the rate of about 2 million a year. It is charging $130 at retail for these HD set tops and doesn’t subsidize them at all, whereas it has always subsidized SD boxes from its subscription revenues.
Dish just offers four HD channels right now Zee TV and Zee Cinema from its parent company, Discovery, National Geographic and also it carried FIFA World Cup broadcasts from ESPN in HD.
Dish is one of the leaders in the DTH revolution that is going on in India, which is seeing around 10 million new subscribers a year. Currently subscriber levels are around 20 million, with 7.5 million and the market leadership held by Dish.
There are a total of 6 major DTH operations in India with the other top two being Sundirect and Tata Sky and significant operations from, the Reliance owned Big TV, Bharti’s Airtel Digital and the public sector owned Doordarshan. There are other companies applying for licenses all the time and a 7th operator in the form of Videocon has also launched.
India has 134 million households with a TV set, out of a total of 223 million and 103 million have pay TV, 83 million cable and 20 million DTH, but the DTH installations have all happened virtually during the past 3 years.
We understand that ST Micro has been not only supplying the SoCs, but designs the completed set top at its Indian design centre and puts it out for contract manufacture and has been doing this since Dish began selling in India.
The STi7111 at the heart of Dish TV’s new HD STBs supports H.264, VC1, MPEG2 and is designed to minimize energy consumption while maintaining system performance. High-definition video is output through the embedded HDMI 1.3 interface at up to 1080p resolution.