Best DTH service in India – Survey results

Here is a survey conducted by Hindustan Times and MaRs on ‘Best DTH service in India’. The survey was conducted in 8 cities in India, namely Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Ahmedabad and Lucknow.

Survey was conducted in 8 different categories and it’s interesting to observe that in most categories, the competition is only between Tata Sky and Airtel Digital TV.

Customer Satisfaction

Tata Sky comes on top in this category scoring 839 where the Industry average is seen at 806 points. Also, 5 of the 8 cities surveyed put Tata Sky at number 1 in terms of customer satisfaction.

Buying Experience

Tata Sky again is on top in buying experience with 807 points while Airtel is at number 2 with 797 points. Airtel though is catching up quickly in buying experience, largely thanks to its Telecom presence across the state that it could use its Airtel Relationship centres fro Digital TV services too.

Audio and Video Quality

Tata Sky is again on top in terms of Audio and Video Quality. This is surprising as Airtel uses the latest technology of MPEG4 DVB S2 while Tata Sky uses MPEG 2 (it simply says DVD quality picture and CD quality sound). One has to understand that these are compression technologies and not essentially related to picture quality.

Channel choices and features

Once again, majority of the public put Tata Sky at the top in terms of Channel packages and features. Its Actve services are being heavily advertised these days and it has some great features too, like Actve darshan, cooking, English, Games, Mall and many more…

Complaint redressal

Airtel Digital TV tops this section while Tata Sky comes second. The industry average points in this section is 728, where Tata Sky scores 765 points. This is again surprising to us, since we thought Tata Sky had a world class Customer support. If this is real, we can only imagine how good Airtel’s support is.

Payment Options

Airtel Digital TV again tops this category and Tata Sky comes second.

Uninterrupted services

Airtel sits at Number 1 and Tata Sky at number 2. This is true since Airtel has technological advantage through its back up services when there is some thing like rain or heavy clouds.

Overall, Tata Sky sits on top in 5 of the 8 categories while Airtel tops in the rest 3. One can see that there is no sight of other DTH operators since each one of them has their concentrated area. SUN Direct, heavily focuses on the South with its range of Sun network channels while Dish TV focuses heavily on its Zee Network channels. And only God knows where Reliance BIG TV is.