NDS to invest $400 mn in R&D in India

NDS, a leading provider of technology solutions for the digital pay television industry, has firmed up plans to invest $ 400 million for research and development work in India.

Jayant Changrani, country head, NDS India said, “India is set to overtake US as the largest direct-to-home (DTH) market in the world this year. Besides, with the government taking initiatives to digitize the analogue cable base over the next few years, the potential for us is huge.” According to industry estimates, India will have 40 million DTH subscribers and around five million digital cable subscribers by the end of 2011. This would still leave a base of 80 million analogue households for digital TV service providers to tap into.

Taking the cue, the UK-based firm has hired 1,600 people at the R&D centre in Bangalore. The centre here has been made the R&D headquarters for the company and the team has been mandated to develop software solutions for markets globally. India and China together constitute a quarter of revenues for NDS , Changrani informed. With business in India posting strong double-digit growth numbers NDS expects India to become the revenue grosser by 2015.

With telecom operators rolling out 3G services, the company is also seeing increasing opportunities in offering technology for monetizing content across multiple platforms. “While digital tv would continue to bring in the major proportion of our revenues, there would be an increasing number of connected devices at home, be it laptops, androids, tablets. We are looking at technologies which can deliver content across screens through a secure media gateway”, Changrani said. To this end, the company has developed solutions which would enable DTH and digital cable operators to showcase the same content on television as well as tablets.