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Dish TV appoints Quasar as sales partner
MUMBAI: Direct-to-home (DTH) service provider Dish TV has appointed Quasar as its exclusive sales partner for platform sales.
As a key business partner, Quasar’s main focus would be to monetise the platform through advertising inventories, alliances, partnerships, sponsorships and innovative solutions enabling marketers to reach out to their target audience.
Dish TV COO Salil Kapoor said, “The DTH category is already 25 million+ households which is around 30 per cent of the C&S (cable & satellite) homes and is growing rapidly towards 33 million households by the end of this year. This rapid expansion of DTH cannot be ignored by any informed marketer or media buyer. Dish TV with its eight million subscribers is one third of this base, straightway giving advertisers a reach into 8 million homes.
“Advertisers across segments are warming up to this new media innovation and are chalking out advertising plans suited to their businesses. We are looking at this as a big opportunity and we are sure our partnership with Quasar will help us reach out to the marketing fraternity.”
“The advantages and benefits of DTH have attracted marketers to advertise on this powerful medium to reach out to their consumers. The clutter free medium offers marketers the exclusive space to engage their consumers. A DTH user on an average spends about half an hour of his day to check out the extra services offered by the service provider. Enhancing a brand’s visibility and evoking recognition with a niche audience is also an advantage that the marketers can encash upon.”
Quasar co-founder Manish Vij says, “Dishtv is a market leader in the DTH space with more than eight million subscribers who become a captive audience for advertisers and this is what would work in our favour while designing attractive solutions for the new age advertisers.
“Our team at Quasar is very excited to be the ‘preferred’ partner of Dishtv India. We bring a wealth of digital experience and expertise with us and are confident of surpassing Dishtv’s expectations in delivery.”
Innovations offered by Dish TV include direct access to eight million households through its default channel and associations with the latest blockbusters on Movie on Demand at a nominal cost. DTH is as transparent for advertisers as it is for the broadcasting industry.
In the current system, household reach and viewership of channels are measured by Television and Media Audit (TAM) through recording meters installed at few locations. DTH set-top-boxes installed at each consumer’s house enables a much more accurate and efficient determination of viewership and reach. On DTH, the advertiser is sure of his message reaching his audience directly.
Dish TV says that its ad proposition provides advertisers unmatched results in tapping their audience on the digital medium. Dish TV is constantly innovating its value added services for its consumers as well as advertisers. While marketers and agencies are extremely excited with the digital space, a lot of brand integration is possible to tap the creative opportunities that the medium provides. For example, job portal Monster.com is currently running a jobs search service on Dish TV called ‘Monster Jobs Active‘.
Brands that have tested Dish TV as an ad option include Pepsi, Maruti, Limca, IDBI Bank, ICICI Bank, ICICI Prudential, Monster.com, Voltas and Kingfisher Airlines. This medium is still seen as an innovation by most marketers, but those who have experimented have stayed on and continue to increase spends on this platform.
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Inshorts Group chief Deepit Purkayastha joins IAB video council for Southeast Asia and India
The co-founder and chief executive of the short-form content platform has been inducted into the IAB SEA+India Video Council, giving India a stronger voice in shaping digital video frameworks
NOIDA: India has long been the world’s most chaotic, multilingual and mobile-first digital market. Now, one of its most prominent short-video executives is getting a seat at the table where the rules are written.
Deepit Purkayastha, co-founder and chief executive of Inshorts Group, has been selected as a member of the IAB SEA+India Video Council for 2026. Run by the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the council brings together senior leaders from Southeast Asia and India to shape standards, best practices and measurement frameworks for the fast-evolving video and digital advertising ecosystem.
The timing is pointed. According to the IAMAI-Kantar Internet in India Report 2025, over 588 million Indians are now consuming short-video content, with growth increasingly driven by rural and non-metro audiences. India’s active internet user base has crossed 950 million, with 57 per cent of users now coming from rural markets. Yet the frameworks that govern how video consumption is measured and monetised were largely designed for single-language, Western markets and have struggled to keep pace with the scale, diversity and complexity of India’s digital landscape.
Purkayastha is no stranger to these debates. He already serves on the AI Council at Marketing and Media Alliance India and as co-chair of the Digital Entertainment Committee at the Internet and Mobile Association of India. His induction into the IAB SEA+India Video Council extends that influence into the global video standards arena.
Inshorts Group sits squarely at the intersection of these forces. Its flagship product, Inshorts, India’s highest-rated short news app, reaches 12 million active users with 60-word news summaries. Its sister platform, Public App, reaches 80 million monthly active users across more than 700 districts and 12 languages, serving communities that most global platforms barely register.
Purkayastha said the opportunity was about building something more representative. “India today sits at the centre of the global video ecosystem, but the frameworks that define how value is created and measured have not always kept pace with the realities of our market,” he said. “Being part of the IAB SEA+India Video Council is an opportunity to contribute to a more representative and future-ready approach, one that accounts for diversity in language, context, and user intent.”
As a council member, Purkayastha will contribute to shaping regional standards across video advertising, measurement and platform governance, with a focus on frameworks that are native to India’s multilingual, mobile-first ecosystem rather than imported from global benchmarks designed elsewhere.
For years, India has been content to play by rules written for other markets. Purkayastha’s induction is a signal that it is done waiting to be consulted and ready to start writing them.
