DTH Collaborates with Dolby to Provide New TV Experience

Direct-to-home (DTH) players are leaving no stone unturned to ensure that their customers receive the best service. In a recent move, various DTH companies like Sun Direct DTH, Airtel Digital TV, and Tata Sky have entered into a tie-up with Dolby to ensure that their subscribers experience surround sound effect similar to that experienced at theaters.

In a move that seems to be in sync with its plan to tap the DTH segment better, the company has introduced Dolby Digital Plus, an enhanced version of the Dolby Digital system. This new introduction will enable broadcast operators to deliver high quality surround sound with the aid of newly enabled set-top boxes.

Highlighting this fact, Mahesh Sundaram, vice president, Asia Pacific, Dolby Laboratories says, The new set-top boxes that are installed in the houses are all enabled with the technology. These specially designed set-top boxes have been totally rolled out on a pan-India basis. And this move is helping us in inching the DTH players more closer to its customers.

The transition to different screens while keeping up with the quality of the content is a major challenge for the company. To counter this, Dolby has created an array of encoders and metadata programs. These include Dolby Ethe companys premier digital audio technology used to distribute multichannel audio; Dolby Digital that is a worldwide format for film, broadcast, and packaged media; Dolby Digital Plus that was developed as a next-generation audio codec that offered flexibility and scalability to its surround sound channels; and aacPlus that is used to lower the bandwidth of content by offering low-bit-rate audio coding.

Tata Sky implemented Dolby Digital Plus as the audio codec for Tata Sky+HD, the new generation personal video recorder (PVR). Meanwhile, Airtel Digital TV has selected Dolbys offering as a surround sound format for its new HD DTH service and set-top boxes with the intention to offer its customers better HD content with upto 7.1 channels of surround sound.

Tata Sky is enabling subscribers to choose channels of their choice, while taking the onus of combating the challenge related to infrastructure to ensure that the same is offered. With the Indian government planning to digitize the television industry, and prices of HD systems set to nosedive downwards, a move to inch closer to the subscriber will always prove to be an added advantage.