Dish TV preparing for Sri Lanka launch

Dish TV India is to launch services in Sri Lanka soon in a joint venture formed with Satnet. The joint venture company Dish TV Lanka  is 70% owned by Dish TV & 30% owned by Satnet and makes use of Satnet's DTH license.

Dish TV which planned to invest Rupees 700 million initially has approved a further Rupees 300 million for its Sri Lankan operations.

Dish TV plans to use Conax as it's encryption provider (the same used by Dish TV India), and the same set-top box suppliers who supply the Indian market. Dish TV will use a dedicated transponder on "SES" satellite.

It's unclear as to when Dish TV will build their own satellite up-linking station in Sri Lanka, however unconfirmed reports say that the up-linking station is already complete.

Its not clear as to the content that Dish TV will make available. Will they allow Asian feeds of popular channels such as HBO, AXN, etc or will they stick solely to the ad infested Indian feeds? Will they give preference to Tamil & Hindi channels over English channels? Will they include local channels? A lot of questions remain, however the competition is most welcome in a market where there is not much movement with one sole DTH company dominating and swapping and replacing channels as they wish and the only IPTV provider doing nothing to improve service quality or add new channels.

It's quite clear that the local operators will react to this development, for them to face the stiff competition posed by Dish TV, they should start now instead of adopting a wait and see attitude.

Source "Television Post": Dish TV readying to launch in Sri Lanka soon via JV company