I have subscribed to TATA SKY for a week, and am overall very satisfied with the product as well as the service I got from their customer care and service staff doing installation and demo. Truly, this product is a pleasant revelation for TV viewers in India like myself.
The picture and audio are DVD quality and there is no need to tune the volume for each channel since the volume is uniform for all channels.
There is a wide range of options, ACTIVE NEWSROOM, ACTIVE WIZKID, ACTIVE GAMES, SHOWCASE, and so on. To this extent the product looks very similar to UK’s SKY TV (similarity does not end in just the name), if you have had any experience with SKY TV you’ll find that even the two remote systems demonstrate a striking similarity. Probably the reason for that is STAR TV is a partner in this business (TATA-SKY) and they and BSkyB (SKY TV) are under the same umbrella of news channels owned by Rupert Murdoch.
One point of concern, though, which needs to be addressed by TATA-SKY as soon as possible, since they are mainly targeting the urban consumers who are staying in apartments/rented flats and are currently subscribing to cable TV. They need to come up with some strategy to promote dish-sharing option among residents of the same housing complex. This is even more necessary because the dish needs to be installed at a certain angle from the ground and also in a fixed direction (South/South-West), which may not be accessible from each individual apartment and requires a permission from other residents for installation in common premises/terraces, etc. (a tripod stand needs to be installed by drilling small holes on the wall or some support, upon which the dish is mounted with the required orientation; a cable wiring connects the dish with the digi-box and then to the TV).
Another point to be noted is that the current payment process as introduced by TATA-SKY is somewhat cumbersome (you have to purchase a prepaid card everytime the existing one runs out of balance, and then call up the help desk to get the new card activated). Instead if they can offer a few more payment options in the form of monthly bills and online payments/direct debits through banks/credit cards, etc, just like other utilities, it would be a lot more convenient to the public.