Q&A: Girish Mehta, CMO, Bharti Airtel Telemedia Services

'Our business' non-voice component is rising much faster than voice'

Bharti Airtel Telemedia Services recently launched broadband TV for its 1.4 million subscribers. It has also partnered with photo service firm Zoomin.Com, wherein its broadband customers will be able to store an unlimited number of photos. In an interaction with Mansi Taneja and Sharmistha Mukherjee, the company’s Chief Marketing Officer, Girish Mehta, talks of its focus on value-added services (VAS) to retain existing and tap new customers and why it is going slow on internet protocol TV (IPTV). Edited excerpts:

What is your strategy for expansion in the broadband segment? Seeing the low penetration, how do you plan to increase usage?
The opportunity in this segment is much bigger than what we are offering. We are present in over 80 cities. The majority of our customers are in the top six to eight cities. We consistently keep looking on where to expand but it depends on market opportunity. At this point of time and given our reach, we are focusing on going deeper rather than wider. By deeper, I mean services: How do you enrich the lives of customers with a deeper portfolio of services? According to the penetration numbers, there is a big opportunity.

What kind of VAS do you look to provide subscribers?
VAS services are a key component of our strategy. The portfolio of services we are building is for existing customers but it will help us in acquiring new ones as well. The focus is on three segments – education, entertainment and gaming. There is also a fourth segment, productivity utilities. For example, PC Secure, wherein anti-virus protection is provided to our customers and it is one of the most popular services currently. The nature of VAS are different here. We are looking at a deeper and a longer engagement from our customers.

You are monetising some of these VAS, so what portion of broadband revenues are you expecting from these services in the next three to four years?
Revenues from these services are growing at least three times as fast as overall revenues from broadband. The opportunity in wired broadband is huge.

Bharti Telemedia is divided into two segments, fixed line voice business and broadband. Across all segments, we are starting to see the non-voice component of our business growing much faster than the voice business. In Telemedia, it is growing the fastest. The revenues from non-voice has just exceeded our voice business; three-four years before, about 80 per cent of revenues were from voice.

What content do you offer in broadband TV?
We offer 29 TV channels and some video-demand channels. It is a niche service and not a replacement for TV. Currently, the price is Rs 99 per month, while at night the prices come down to Rs 49 per month. More, there are no internet usage charges. We will also soon offer enough speed to support these services.Currently, the minimum is 256 kpbs and we offer 512 kbps. We will increase this. For instance, if a customer visits a broadband TV website, that customer automatically gets 1mbps of speed, even if he/she has subscribed to a lower plan.

What is the status of your IPTV service? How fast are you expanding it?
Currently, we offer IPTV in Delhi and the National Capital Region (NCR), apart from the recent launch in Bangalore. It is not really a mass medium. The overwhelming feedback we get from IPTV is for ‘time shift TV’, where seven days of programming can be stored at the servers in the backend. Here, all the programming is stored whether a customer has switched on the TV or not and whether he/she is watching TV or not. It can also be remotely activated. Even if there is no power, the data will be stored.

In Delhi and NCR, we have a subscriber base of 50,000. We are not really looking at going pan-India at this point of time. It requires much higher bandwidth and huge investment. We are going a little bit slow on this. As customer applications, both broadband and IPTV will continue to exist. But, whether it (IPTV) is a business decision or not, we will have to work out.