Reliance Big TV Gives Free Access to HD Channels But With a Catch

On offer is 5 years’ subscription to free-to-air channels & 1-year access to HD channels. Is it as good as it seems?

Reliance Big TV will give Indians access, free of cost, to an extensive range of HD-quality entertainment channels. The company claims to be offering the channels along with a HD HEVC set-top box, free of cost – but with a lot of riders attached.

The said HD HEVC set-top-box is said to come with all the latest features, like schedule recording, USB port, YouTube, recording and viewing channels simultaneously, etc.

This bundled plan also gives you access to both free-to-air channels (FTA) – up to 500 for 5 years – and pay channels for 1 year, across the country, as mentioned in the company statement. All this sounds too good to be true, right? So what’s the catch? There’s more to this offering, and here’s what you should know.

Just like Reliance Jio applied the ‘effectively free’ tag with its JioPhone in 2017, this time another Reliance entity, Big TV (Anil Ambani-owned) has taken a similar stance. But as you can see below, even when the offer says ‘free of cost access’, there are a lot of numbers in the equation, to be paid by the consumer.

To break down the cost of the plan for this Reliance Big TV offer, there’s a booking amount of Rs 499, after which you pay Rs 1,500 for 1 year free access to paid channels in HD and 500 FTA channels for 5 years.

Reliance Big TV claims that the Rs 1,999 paid (the loyalty amount) initially will be refunded after completion of three years in the form of recharges.

But before you get the loyalty amount back, subscribers need to recharge a monthly amount of Rs 300 from the 2nd year onwards for all pay channels, and the amount is only refunded on completion of subscription of pay channels continuously for next 2 years with Reliance Big TV.

The delivery of the set-top-box will commence 30 days from date of booking.

Even after you consider paying the aforementioned amount, it still sounds like a good deal for the number of channels and device on offer – it’s just not free, the way they advertise.

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