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Asianet to go fully digital in a year
MUMBAI: Asianet Satellite Communications Ltd, promoted by Rajan Raheja who also controls Hathway Cable & Datacom, has taken the radical decision of switching off its analogue cable TV service within a year and plans to make a fresh investment of Rs 1 billion as it pushes to become India‘s first multi-system operator (MSO) to offer only digital cable.
For starters, the Kerala-based MSO has just completed converting Trivandrum into a full digital network. Asianet is offering its Trivandrum subscribers five bouquet options up to 150 channels and plans to upgrade this to 220 channels within three months.
“We have become the first cable TV service provider in India to achieve this milestone, well ahead of the national government‘s full digitisation mandate by December 2014. We have 75,000 direct subscribers in Trivandrum and our target is to completely digitise our network in Kerala within nine months,” said Asianet Satellite Communications president and COO Sankaranarayana.
Asianet has already invested Rs 1 billion towards digitisation and seeded 350,000 set-top boxes. The net-breakeven regional MSO has 615,000 direct subscribers.
“We will be investing Rs 1 billion within a year. We will require Rs 750 million to digitise our direct subscribers. We are also looking at doing some amount of digitisation for secondary subscribers,” said Sankaranaryana.
Asianet offers the digital set-top boxes free. “We are subsidising the STBs. We believe our pay channel content cost will come down. The ARPU (average revenue per user) for digital is Rs 200 while in case of analogue is Rs 150,” averred Sankaranaryana.
Asianet, which was in talks with US private equity giant Providence for diluting a minority stake in 2007, is not looking at offloading any equity now. “We are not in talks with any private equity firm. We have decided to digitise our network on our own. We have access to vendor financing and debt. We have a healthy Ebitda because we own the last mile,” said Sankaranaryana.
Kerala‘s dominant MSO has a technical tie up with Cisco for digitisation. “Digitisation will also help us in further improving our broadband services,” said Sankaranaryana.
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With 57 per cent single new users, Ashley Madison rebrands as discreet dating platform
Platform says majority of new members now identify as single
INDIA: Ashley Madison is shedding the “married-dating” label that defined it for two decades, repositioning itself as a platform for discreet dating in what it calls the post-social media age.
The rebrand, unveiled in India on 27 February, 2026, marks a structural shift in business model and identity. Once synonymous with married dating, the company now describes itself as the “premier destination for discreet dating” under a new tagline: Where Desire Meets Discretion.
The pivot is data-driven. Internal figures show that 57 per cent of global sign-ups between 1 January and 31 December, 2025 identified as single: a notable departure from the platform’s married core. The company argues that its community has already evolved beyond its original positioning.
“In an age where our lives have been constantly put on public display, privacy has become the new luxury,” said Ashley Madison chief strategy officer Paul Keable. He framed the platform’s offering as “ethical discretion” for singles, separated, divorced and non-monogamous users seeking private connections.
The shift also taps into wider digital fatigue. A global survey conducted by YouGov for Ashley Madison, covering 13,071 adults across Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, India, Italy, Mexico, Spain, Switzerland, the UK and the US, found mounting discomfort with hyper-public online lives.
Among dating app users, 30 per cent cited constant swiping and messaging as a source of fatigue, while 24 per cent pointed to pressure to curate public-facing profiles and early personal disclosure. Some 27 per cent said fears of screenshots or information being shared contributed to exhaustion; an equal share cited unwanted attention.
The retreat from oversharing appears broader. According to the survey, 46 per cent of adults actively try to keep most aspects of their life private online. Only 8 per cent feel comfortable sharing most aspects publicly, while 35 per cent say they are becoming more selective about what they disclose.
Ashley Madison is betting that this cultural recalibration towards controlled visibility can be monetised. By doubling down on privacy infrastructure and reframing itself around discretion rather than infidelity, the company is attempting to convert reputational baggage into a premium proposition.
