Consim Info’s BharatMatrimony and People Interactive’s Shaadi.com have launched matrimony services on DTH via Dish TV and Tata Sky respectively. The Bharatmatrimony and Tata Sky property is called Actve Matrimony while the Dish and Shaadi venture is called Shaadi Active. For those that missed the bus, there is still DDdirect, Doordarshan’s DTH offering, around in the market. ActveM has been in the works for over a year and features 1000 new matrimonial listings refreshed every week classified acorrding to languages and communities. The service isn’t completely platform independent and requires listing codes to be sent via SMS to a shortcode to retrieve contact details. Each query will cause Rs 10 to be deducted (ActveM) from the subscribers DTH account, in addition to the Rs 3 for the SMS.

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DTH is a very different animal from cable, capable of reaching rural areas where MSO’s can’t. Do remember services like these are highly watchable, even if it is a meat market under the guise of entertainment. Imagine video profiles of grown men and women talking about their attributes. Dish TV has other interactive services like AstroTV centered around the ‘push the red button’ feature.

More cross-media offerings (for eg: Magicbricks, Makaan, etc) may be in the offing. Real Estate TV, a 24 hours TV channel dedicated to real estate and infrastrucutre is in the initial stages of discussions with DishTV, Tata Sky and Reliance. The red button feature itself is a distinguishing feature of DTH, allowing interactivity, albiet limited, on an otherwise top-down platform. Besides running multiple feeds, the platform is also capable of hosting Value Added Services and content based time synched interactivity.