The number of television homes using DD FreeDish will increase from 45 million at present to around 50-60 million in the next four to five years, said Prasar Bharati CEO Gaurav Dwivedi asserting that there has been a consistent growth in the only free-to-air (FTA) DTH service in India.

Dwivedi said so at the FICCI FRAMES 2024 event held in Mumbai on Tuesday.

“Free Dish has been growing continuously and consistently. While the other media is growing rapidly, set-top boxes are also here to stay and they are well entrenched at least for the foreseeable future.

“The number (DD Free Dish homes) that we have is 45 million and these are only estimates because we are not a subscriber-led set-top box system. But we see that the number may grow to 50-60 million in at least 4-5 years…” said Dwivedi.

Over the years, there have been increasing discussions on the growing popularity of DD Free Dish service, which was launched in 2003-04 by Prasar Bharati as a free-to-air (FTA) Direct-To-Home (DTH) Service where there is no monthly subscription fee from the viewers.

It requires a one-time investment of about Rs 2000 to purchase a set-top-box (STB) and small-sized dish antenna with accessories. Currently, there are over 160 TV channels on the platform and over 40 radio channels on Free Dish with a reach of around 45 million households.

“When FreeDish was started, the industry was in a very nascent stage. It set the context for the rest of the industry to grow and develop and in the first few years the situation was such that all broadcasters were like if the slot is there, just put your channel on it. Then about 2-3 years back, the industry grew to large numbers, to 210 million TV homes.

“Our revenue was under Rs 800 crores. We were looking at ways to roll that without compromising on the number of channels we were able to offer. But we did a little bit of tweaking in our methodology and in one year, the revenue jumped to over 45-46%. The same trend is maintained this year as well,” Dwivedi said.

When the platform was first launched, it had just 20 channels under it but now there are over 200 channels.

While consumers continue to enjoy the Free Dish service, it has disturbed the cable operators as it is allegedly providing unencrypted channels, which is "promoting piracy”.

An industry expert, on the condition of anonymity, told exchange4media that one cannot estimate the number of households using DD Free Dish as the set-top boxes are without encryption.

“It is impossible to have a count of the households using the service because the set-top boxes are unencrypted. DD Free Dish service is adversely impacting the cable TV industry. The issue has already been raised before on various platforms but is not being acknowledged,” said the industry veteran who did not wish to be named.

This issue has been raised in several legal forums as well as before the parliament in the recently submitted report of the Parliamentary Committee on Communications and Information Technology.