Earlier this month, Zee group owned DTH operator Dish TV inked a deal with Quasar Media as its exclusive sales partner. Dish TV is the largest DTH player in the country, with 8 million subscribers, followed TATA Sky, which recently crossed 6 million. The partnership allows Quasar to monetize the platform through advertising inventories, alliances, partnerships, sponsorships and other solutions. Now Dish TV isn't the first to venture into this domain - NetworkPlay had inked deals with Airtel Digital TV last year, and followed that up with a deal to sell advertising for Reliance BIG TV. Frankly, we find Dish TV's claim, that "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," highly improbable. [release(pdf)] Quasar: Ad Agency Or Sales House? What's particularly noteworthy about this deal is that while NetworkPlay is an ad network / sales house, and represents the supply side (publishers), Quasar Media is an advertising agency, and usually represents the demand side (advertiser). In this case, Quasar is representing the publisher (Dish TV), as a sales house. We'd prefer that there be a separation between agencies and networks. If anything, one would have expected the deal to be through Tyroo, the SITG-Yahoo owned advertising network. Measurement? When NetworkPlay had tied up with Airtel, they'd told us that they're selling inventory according to CPM (Cost Per Milli impressions), hard as that was to believe, since DTH doesn't have a feedback loop,…
