Dish TV India said it has completed the legal process of merging itself with rival Videocon D2h.
Dish TV said it has filed all required documents with the Registrar of Companies, Mumbai, Maharashtra today.
With this, it said, “the companies have completed all the steps pursuant to the aforementioned scheme read with NCLT Order and Videocon D2H Limited has merged with and into Dish TV India Limited on March 22, 2018, which is the Effective date of the scheme.”
The merger is in the form of a non-cash deal involving the issuing of shares of the merged entity to the holders of Videocon d2h shares.
According to the current scheme, Dish TV shareholders would end up holding about 55% of the merged entity, while the rest would go to Videocon D2h shareholders, including the parent company.
No further details, such as the merger of the actual services, were announced.
It is expected that the companies will merge their brands into one — Videocon Dish TV — and eventually serve all content from a single location.
At present, the combined company is using three satellites at three locations — NSS 6 located over 95 degree longitude, GSAT 15 located over 93.5 degree longitude and ST2 located over 88 degree longitude.
Currently, all Videocon D2h subscribers are being served using ST2, while Dish TV subscribers get their content from the other two satellites.
The company will be able to save Rs 100-125 cr per year if it can move all its customers to either the Dish TV signal or the Videocon signal.
For now, it has not clarified whether it intends to do this or not.
Even without a physical merger of the services, the combined entity stands to gain much by way of its increasing bargaining power with regard to broadcasting companies.
With an estimated combined market share of around 40% of all DTH subscribers in India, it would be very difficult for any channel or group to ignore the combined company.
For the record, Star India currently has a dispute with the two distributors over an increase in the subscription charges that it charges for its five dozen channels.
The two DTH operators are among those with the lowest per-subscriber revenues in India. Both get a large part of their subscriber base from the Hindi-speaking, North Indian market.
The merger has made the two the top DTH operator in India by number of subscribers, and possibly by revenue as well.