Dish TV vs. Tata Sky comparison
Written by Mr. Channel on June 25, 2010.
Founded in 2003, Dish TV was the first DTV television provider in India, they started a new era in home entertainment ever since their inception. As the market grew, the potential in a DTH market was realized and an year later, Tata Sky was incorporated, but launched its 205 channels package in 2006. As of right now, both providers offer great packages with immense value for their users and subscribers, with high quality in picture and sound to boast. However, if you look into the minute details of their packages, differences, flaws, shortcomings and overviews in general, the better one becomes apparent.
Over the years, Dish TV has made a name for itself, they got the initial market of users due to essentially being pioneers, however they couldn’t keep with their quality for too long. Upgrade in their services is not entirely concentrated on channel availability, image quality or sound capability. What this means is, Dish TV does offer a lot of things, but they miss out on the essentials far more often than not. A couple of examples would be the overall lacking quality of Star Movies and Star Cricket. The EPG feature on Dish TV isn’t very competent either and continues to host problems.
Unfortunately for it’s subscribers, Dish TV’s problems don’t seem to go away and appear on a regular basis. Customers often complain about the picture quality and audio, as stated previously. There has been a dim focus on the addition of International channels, also, Dish TV has been known to not add channels like Neo Sports in the past when the demand was at it’s biggest during cricket tournaments. In the customer care department, Dish TV doesn’t exactly shine either, with the more complicated problems going unsolved for long periods of time frequently. All the good things about Dish TV can be found in Tata Sky in the same capacity or better as well.
Tata Sky now, on the other hand, is a far more favorable option than Dish TV for regular customers. It has been in service for almost four years and have shown through time to be customer oriented. They continue improvement in their services, have better audio and video quality than Dish TV, and their software on the STBs is firm and stable. EPG is well managed and updated and the customer care is helpful in most situations. The most important thing, when it comes to Television, is the quality of telecast, even though both Tata Sky and Dish TV sport MPEG-2 digital compression with considerable image quality, Tata Sky has took a step further and launched Tata Sky+ that by far surpasses picture and sound quality as compared to Dish TV. Dish TV on the other hand has made no efforts to reach out to MPEG-4 compression yet. Dish TV recently introduced HD channels, but Tata Sky immediately complied and launched HD on their platform as well.
Even though Tata Sky is the better alternative. They aren’t perfect, and do have their share of problems, thankfully nothing major though, Tata Sky doesn’t boast a high amount of channels, but the ones that are available will accommodate any regular individual just fine, they lack a little on the regional channels part. A lot of times, a few key channels will be missing on the base packages and you’ll have to pay extra just to get those few channels in. Personally, for my needs, I believe Tata Sky’s packages are a little costlier than Dish TV, but other than that there are no problems. Tata Sky regularly adds new channels as well, and as mentioned before, have good customer support.
In the clash between these two pioneers of the Indian DTH industry, it seems as of now that Tata Sky is slowly taking the lead, with more emphasis on new technology (as showcased by their effort at DVR recording and MPEG-4 compression), Dish TV seems to be uninterested for now, but with more and more people switching to Tata Sky, they may have to take drastic action soon.
