DittoTV

» see dittotv.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The company that sold me my line at home got into television while I was watching. Tivibu started in February 2010 and the IPTV version followed a year later, so around here the idea that your internet provider would also hand you a channel list arrived early and without much drama. DittoTV was the other version of that idea. Not the carrier selling television over its own wire, but a broadcaster trying to become the wire.

It came out of Zee Digital Convergence in 2012, the digital arm of Zee Entertainment, and for a while it was the biggest paid live-TV service in India. Over a hundred channels in ten languages, with catch-up for anything you had missed. There was an electronic program guide on top of it, and a recommendation engine that tried to guess what you would sit through next. It ran on phones and on cheap Android boxes, and it sold outside India too, because a Zee channel in ten languages has an audience in every country Indians have moved to.

The interesting part is what was in the list. Zee's own networks were there, but so were Star Plus and Colors, which is to say the channels of the companies Zee spent the rest of its day competing against. A broadcaster was selling you its rivals because a hundred channels is a product and twelve channels is a promotion. Very few media companies ever manage to think that clearly about their own catalog.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

Getting paid was the hard problem, and DittoTV solved it the way Indian mobile solved most things in that decade. Card penetration was thin, so the subscription was billed through the mobile operators instead, wired up through Fortumo so that Airtel or Vodafone put the charge on a bill you were already paying. Multi-currency payment came later for the diaspora.

That arrangement bought it several years of real subscribers at a time when almost nobody in India was paying for video online. Jio had not arrived yet, mobile data was still metered like a scarce good, and a person watching a serial on a train was doing something that cost real money. DittoTV was a premium product in a market that had not decided premium was a category.

~ what replaced it ~

Zee spent 2017 building one thing to replace two, because it was running a subscription service in DittoTV and a free ad-supported one in OZEE, and neither had the weight to stand against what Hotstar was doing with cricket. ZEE5 was announced as the merger of both.

It went live on 15 February 2018 with a hundred thousand hours of content, and existing subscribers were pushed across at midnight with the same login they had before. Nothing was destroyed and nobody lost access, which is how a product can disappear completely without a single user noticing a service interruption. That is the quietest kind of death in this catalog and also the most common one inside big media, where a name gets retired by a brand strategy rather than by a market.

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