Hathway Cable & Datacom Ltd, formerly BITV Cable Networks, is an Indian
cable television
Cable television is a system of delivering television programming to consumers via radio frequency (RF) signals transmitted through coaxial cables, or in more recent systems, light pulses through fibre-optic cables. This contrasts with broa ...
service operator based in
Mumbai
Mumbai (, ; also known as Bombay — the official name until 1995) is the capital city of the Indian state of Maharashtra and the ''de facto'' financial centre of India. According to the United Nations, as of 2018, Mumbai is the second- ...
. It was the first company to provide Internet using the
CATV network in India, and the first cable operator to launch a digital platform in 2006. Hathway Broadband Internet was the first cable
ISP
An Internet service provider (ISP) is an organization that provides services for accessing, using, or participating in the Internet. ISPs can be organized in various forms, such as commercial, community-owned, non-profit, or otherwise private ...
in India. Business India Television (BITV) Cable Networks Pvt Ltd was acquired by Hathway in 1999. As of 2007, the company had a 51% stake in Bhupendran Bhaskar Multinet and 50% stake in Gujarat Telelinks Pvt Ltd (GTPL). In 2011, Hathway GTPL entered in Assam with a MoM with V&S Cable Pvt Ltd, and started operations in West Bengal as they acquired KCBPL (Kolkata Cable & Broadband Pariseva Ltd) to create a subsidiary, GTPLKCBPL, responsible for providing services in
West Bengal
West Bengal (, Bengali: ''Poshchim Bongo'', , abbr. WB) is a state in the eastern portion of India. It is situated along the Bay of Bengal, along with a population of over 91 million inhabitants within an area of . West Bengal is the fourt ...
.
Other services
In the second half of 2011, Hathway launched its HDTV services in
Mumbai
Mumbai (, ; also known as Bombay — the official name until 1995) is the capital city of the Indian state of Maharashtra and the ''de facto'' financial centre of India. According to the United Nations, as of 2018, Mumbai is the second- ...
,
Hyderabad
Hyderabad ( ; , ) is the capital and largest city of the Indian state of Telangana and the ''de jure'' capital of Andhra Pradesh. It occupies on the Deccan Plateau along the banks of the Musi River (India), Musi River, in the northern part ...
,
Bangalore
Bangalore (), officially Bengaluru (), is the capital and largest city of the Indian state of Karnataka. It has a population of more than and a metropolitan population of around , making it the third most populous city and fifth most ...
,
Chennai
Chennai (, ), formerly known as Madras ( the official name until 1996), is the capital city of Tamil Nadu, the southernmost Indian state. The largest city of the state in area and population, Chennai is located on the Coromandel Coast of th ...
,
Indore
Indore () is the largest and most populous Cities in India, city in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. It serves as the headquarters of both Indore District and Indore Division. It is also considered as an education hub of the state and is t ...
,
Kolkata
Kolkata (, or , ; also known as Calcutta , the official name until 2001) is the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal, on the eastern bank of the Hooghly River west of the border with Bangladesh. It is the primary business, comme ...
; in
Gujarat
Gujarat (, ) is a state along the western coast of India. Its coastline of about is the longest in the country, most of which lies on the Kathiawar peninsula. Gujarat is the fifth-largest Indian state by area, covering some ; and the ninth ...
in 2013, and in
Odisha
Odisha (English: , ), formerly Orissa ( the official name until 2011), is an Indian state located in Eastern India. It is the 8th largest state by area, and the 11th largest by population. The state has the third largest population of ...
in 2015. Their new ''HD DVR''
set-top box
A set-top box (STB), also colloquially known as a cable box and historically television decoder, is an information appliance device that generally contains a TV-tuner input and displays output to a television set and an external source of sign ...
initially provided 8 HD channels, with availability increasing to sixteen in March 2012. There are thirty channels available as of 2020. With this addition, Hathway is now the provider with the most HD channels in its Indian market.
Hathway Broadband Internet was one of the earliest cable ISP services in the Indian cities of
Delhi
Delhi, officially the National Capital Territory (NCT) of Delhi, is a city and a union territory of India containing New Delhi, the capital of India. Straddling the Yamuna river, primarily its western or right bank, Delhi shares borders w ...
, Mumbai, Indore,
Bhopal
Bhopal (; ) is the capital city of the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh and the administrative headquarters of both Bhopal district and Bhopal division. It is known as the ''City of Lakes'' due to its various natural and artificial lakes. It i ...
,
Lucknow
Lucknow (, ) is the capital and the largest city of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh and it is also the second largest urban agglomeration in Uttar Pradesh. Lucknow is the administrative headquarters of the eponymous district and division ...
and
Kolkata
Kolkata (, or , ; also known as Calcutta , the official name until 2001) is the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal, on the eastern bank of the Hooghly River west of the border with Bangladesh. It is the primary business, comme ...
. As of 2013, the highest possible speed provided is 50Mbit/s. It uses
Cisco Systems
Cisco Systems, Inc., commonly known as Cisco, is an American-based multinational corporation, multinational digital communications technology conglomerate (company), conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. Cisco develo ...
's
Docsis
Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification (DOCSIS) is an international telecommunications standard that permits the addition of high-bandwidth data transfer to an existing cable television (CATV) system. It is used by many cable televisio ...
3 technology in three cities, where the speeds exceed 50 Mbit/s.
There are around 11 million subscribers, of which around 1.77 million currently have wireless/broadband internet available. Approximately 430,000 of these users are using Hathway broadband services.
Hathway was the first Indian digital cable service provider to release
digital video recorder
A digital video recorder (DVR) is an electronic device that records video in a digital format to a disk drive, USB flash drive, SD memory card, SSD or other local or networked mass storage device. The term includes set-top boxes with direct to d ...
(DVR) services, on March 12, 2009, powered by
NDS NDS may stand for:
* Low German ( nl, Nedersaksisch, links=no, german: Niederdeutsche Sprache, links=no, ISO 639-2 language code: nds), a West Germanic language native to Northern Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands
* Lower Saxony (german: Niedersa ...
XTV.
Acquisition by Reliance Industries
Hathway was the
multi-service operator owned by the Rajan Raheja Group.
In 2003, it stood as one of the largest multi-system operators in India alongside the
Hinduja Group
Hinduja Group is an Indian transnational conglomerate. The group is present in eleven sectors including automotive, oil and specialty chemicals, banking and finance, IT and ITeS, cyber security, healthcare, trading, infrastructure project d ...
companies of RPG Cable and InCablenet, and the
Essel Group
Essel Group, (also known as Zee Group) is an Indian multinational conglomerate holding company and corporate promoter headquartered in Mumbai, Maharashtra, India. The company has had business interests in mass media, infrastructure and packag ...
controlled
Siti Cable,
and also one of the three major cable distributors in India alongside DEN Networks and InCablenet.
On October 17, 2018,
Reliance Industries
Reliance Industries Limited is an Indian multinational conglomerate company, headquartered in Mumbai. It has diverse businesses including energy, petrochemicals, natural gas, retail, telecommunications, mass media, and textiles. Reliance is ...
announced that it had acquired a 51.34% stake in Hathway for . The acquisition received approval from the
Competition Commission of India
The Competition Commission of India (CCI) is the chief national competition regulator in India. It is a statutory body within the Ministry of Corporate Affairs and is responsible for enforcing the Competition Act, 2002 to promote competition a ...
in January 2019. Reliance acquired an additional 20.61% stake in Hathway through an open offer worth in March 2019, taking its total stake in the company to 71.95%.
References
External links
*
{{Nifty 200 companies
Companies based in Mumbai
Mass media in Mumbai
Cable television companies of India
Reliance Media
Year of establishment missing
Companies listed on the National Stock Exchange of India
Companies listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange