Bharti Airtel is likely to launch Airtel Xstream Smart Box soon for its Digital TV customers. Speaking to analysts in an earnings call a few days back after the announcement of its financial results for the quarter ending June 30, 2019, Bharti Airtel CEO Gopal Vittal said that the company was happy with the way DTH business had progressed.
According to Android TV-Guide, the box will run on Android 9.0. It can be used to broadcast DTH, IPTV, and OTT content. The box has been manufactured by Technicolor It has a 1.8 GHz Quad-Core CPU with Broadcom VideoCore V HW (V3D-510) as its GPU. It has 2 GB RAM with a storage of 8 GB.
Commentating on the Airtel Xstream Smart Box he said “One of the things we are looking at is to bring in a box, which will kind of offer full-converged entertainment as well as the capacity to deliver broadband. This will happen soon, and we’re already excited that once we do that, then it’s a full-converged play that we can potentially deliver across multiple spaces. There have been some concerns about cord-cutting in urban areas and metros. We haven’t seen any evidence of that yet.”
DreamDTH had earlier exclusively broken the news of Airtel planning to launch Airtel Xstream Stick and renaming Airtel TV app as Airtel Xstream. According to a reply from Airtel’s NET Team received by our member Vadirocks on his request to upgrade to Airtel Xstream Smart Box the company said that the box is yet to be launched. The NET Team said that it would keep him updated on the same.
When asked if the company was willing to commit more capital to the DTH business Vittal said that “That business is self-funding. We’re committing as much capital as that business needs. It’s a good, neat little business, which is growing very well, and after the recent changes in the regulatory framework, I think we’ve been able to pick up almost 630,000 customers net additions in last quarter, which is a very, very big increase, a lot of it coming from the cable side. So we are pleased with how that business has progressed.”
When asked about whether Airtel would be willing to acquire other competitors in the industry referring to Airtel-Dish TV news Vittal said “Yes. I think those are newspaper reports, so that is something that we can’t comment on.”
