Hinduja's NXT Digital to invest $20 mn to roll out HITS service

NXT Digital offers white label and full services to last-mile operators and multi-system operators

Grant Investrade Limited, a subsidiary of Hinduja Ventures Limited, is lining up an investment of $20 million to roll out its headend-in-the-sky (HITS) digital TV service under the NXT Digital brand by the end of this financial year, said its managing director Tony D'Silva.

The company has so far invested $80 million in setting up a broadcast centre in Noida and developing COPE (cable operators' premises equipment). NXT Digital offers white label and full services to last-mile operators (LMOs or cable operators) and multi-system operators (MSOs).

Competing with direct-to-home (DTH) players, NXT Digital will offer 500 MPEG-4 encrypted channels and local channel insertions through standard and high-definition set-top-boxes (STBs). NXT Digital services will be rolled out by the end of this month.

"Within the first few weeks of going to market in Phase-III and Phase-IV areas, where over 80 million households are yet to be digitised, NXT Digital has already been signed up to reach one million analog TV households through LMOs and MSOs," D'Silva told mediapersons here on Tuesday.

The NXT Digital service will offer TV channels to cable operators through satellite instead of the traditional headend, where multitudes of satellite dishes and antennas are used to grab cable stations from dozens of communication satellites.

Stating that Grant Investrade has tied up with technology partners like Thaicom-7 for satellite C-band transponders, Nagriavision DLK for conditional access system-embedded platform, OpenTV1 for middleware and Hansen Technologies for subscription management and billing solutions, D'Silva said the company had signed an agreement with a Maharashtra-based manufacturer for STBs.