Broadbandindia Magazine

The Government is in favour of a three-tier system for regulating broadcasting in the country – self-regula tion by the channels, adjudication by broadcasting bodies like the Indian Broadcasting Foundation or the News Broadcasters Association, and final intervention if necessary by an independent regulator. Stating this, Information and Broadcasting Ministry Joint Secretary (Broadcasting) Zohra Chatterjee said that while the government did not want to regulate and wanted an independent regulator, there was unfortunately lack of support from the media which only wanted selfregulation and this was often not workable. However, she said the government was concerned about promoting digitisation and offering greater value added services to the consumer through this mode. Addressing in well-known digital summit, she said the government had set a deadline of 2017 for the national broadcaster Doordarshan to go completely digital and switch off analogue. She was also in favour of a voluntary switch-over to digitization within two years. She was not in favour of switching off analogue till what she termed as ‘the sunset hour’.

CAS Policy

Information & Broadcasting (I&B) ministry is looking to set a deadline for television viewers to shift to digital television or Conditional access system (CAS) voluntarily before making it mandatory, joint secretary in the I&B ministry Zohra Chatterjee said. Zohra also regretted that the billing system for CAS was not satisfactory. “We are getting numerous complaints from CAS subscribers from notified area where Set Top Box (STB), which de-encrypts pay channel, was installed in January, 2007. CAS enables a consumer to receive digital television signals with better picture quality through a set top box and also pay for the channels he or she wants to watch rather than receiving and paying for all channels beamed by the cable operator. The successful switchover to the CAS in the select areas of the four metros has consumers wondering why the new system has been sold to them as viewer friendly, especially when many could end up spending more on cable bill than in the earlier regime. In short, the new system is better because the consumer pays for what he watches and not what he  receives. With the first phase of implementation of Conditional Access System nearing completion, The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) feels CAS should roll out voluntarily rather than be mandated in other parts of the country. Previously The Government on 31 July, 2006 issued a notification for the roll-out of Conditional Access System in Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata. The notification was issued by the Information and Broadcasting Ministry, which said it should be in place in the notified areas by December 31, 2006. The notification honours a commitment made to the Delhi High Court which on 20 July had ordered that CAS should be introduced in all three metros on or before 1 January 2007.

HITS Policy

However, she hoped that the HITS policy (Head-end in the Sky), to be announced within the next few months, would help as that would speed up the digitisation process. The pending HITS policy will be considered by the Cabinet soon. It is a satellite multiplex service that provides cable channels to cable television operations. HITS is a digital delivery platform to distribute multiple channels via satellite straight to cable operators. The essential difference between a HITS operator and the operation of Multi-System Operator (MSO) is that the former transmits the bundle of channels to the cable operators using a satellite, whereas the  latter does the same through a cable.

HITS operator’s area of coverage spans the whole country, whereas the MSO’s area of coverage is confined to a limited geographical area (typically a town or a city) close to his headend. Cable operators subscribing to services of a HITS operator will be able to provide a large number of channels with better picture quality and choice of channels to their subscribers than the conventional analogue services. The introduction of HITS services will speed up the process of migration from analogue to digital mode of transmission and distribution of television signals resulting in benefits to all stakeholders including subscribers, cable operators, broadcasters and the Government.

The HITS platform allows a service provider to transmit television signals through satellite, differing from Direct To Home in the last mile, where signals are transmitted through cable. The system will allow a HITS operator — unrestricted by the kind of network an MSO requires — a national foothold, and offer the consumer digital quality content and addressable features. Currently there are only two licence holders who haven’t rolled out commercial services yet. The Essel Group’s Wire and Wireless Ltd has been running trials for many months now.

According to Mr A. Mohan, Executive Vice-President, Essel Group, pricing-related issues between broadcasters and them need to be addressed. WWIL has approached the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, which also regulates broadcasting, on the matter. While DTH gets content at half the cost of what cable operators pay broadcasters, a HITS operator (unlike a DTH operator) will share revenues with the last mile cable operator. While TRAI is to review content pricing issues in DTH’s case, WWIL is hoping pricing for HITS services will also be taken up. A digital headend costs Rs 10-15 crore, under HITS it would only cost Rs 1.6 -2 lakh for a 100 channel, according to Mr Mohan.

Cable TV Regulation Act Policy

Joint secretary in the I&B ministry Zohra Chatterjee said the government was considering certain amendments in the Cable TV Networks (Regulation) Act 1995 to check malpractices like under-declaration and violation of piracy by placing provision for de-registration and penalties wherever necessary. The Government has a three-tier monitoring process: there were certain authorized officers under the Act, District Monitoring Committees had been put in place, and there was an Inter- Ministerial Committee at the centre headed by the Additional Secretary in the I&B Ministry. Zohra wanted the broadcasters to conduct consumer awareness workshops to help the switch over to CAS or digital networks.

TRAI member R N Prabhakar said the sector regulator was for the first time carrying out a thorough exercise into the business models of broadcasters and the entire gamut of television and cable services, and would come out with comprehensive recommendations on various issues. “The stakeholders are yet to give us all the details that would help us in getting a fix on costs and coming out with a comprehensive policy,” said Prabhakar. Noting that the Indian cable and TV industry in the country had become one of the fastest growing industries in the world, he regretted that it was marred by disputes relating to actual subscriber base, poor quality of service, and inadequate consumer redressal mechanism. The non-availability of sophisticated data, lack of supervisory guidance, and unorganized development of cable TV service were some of the roadblocks to explore its full potential. Trai had, therefore, recommended a well-defined robust and supporting licensing framework to restructure the Cable TV services, suggesting a roadmap for ensuring effective licensing compliance, attracting investment and facilitate new value added services.

Doordarshan Policy

The term for TV in Hindi is Doordarshan. The anniversary that is currently bringing the national broadcaster a lot of attention is that of the medium, not the organisation, which did not come into existence till 1976. While half a century of televisi on in India is substantially about Doordarshan, it is by no means entirely so, nor has a single broadcasting culture emerged. The advent of TV was with school broadcasting in 1959, confined to Delhi; there was farm broadcasting in 1967 inspired by Vikram Sarabhai, there was also Chitrahaar, produced by the TV division of Akashvani. Before Doordarshan was born, there was SITE, the Satellite   Instructional Television Experiment which added its own dimension to the emerging television experience, exposing villages in six States to the idiot box for the first time.

Now it celebrated its golden jubilee recently and now the country’s public television broadcaster Doordarshan is all set to go digital by 2017, said an I & B ministry official. This will also help all channels to reach rural areas, instead of just Doordarshan which was the country’s only terrestrial channel. “Doordarshan will be fully digitised by 2017. That is the goal we have set. We are also preferring a full dialogue with the industry (technology platforms),” said Zohra Chatterji, joint secretary I & B ministry at the fifth annual India Digital Networks Summit (IDNS 2009). “But before that the public needs to be educated about it. Another area that has to be looked into is billing. The consumer is not satisfied with the billing (of digital services),” Chatterji added. Presently, Doordarshan operates 19 channels – two All India channels (DD National and DD News), 11 Regional languages Satellite Channels, four State Networks, an International channel, a Sports Channel.

Over half a century then, India has evolved a broadcasting culture which is an amalgam of varied television cultures. It is about public television aping private channels, about Films Division influencing Doordarshan’s TV idiom, about Bollywood meeting MTV, Mexican soaps meeting Mumbai’s serial factory, mythologicals meeting Bollywood, and Fox News meeting Aaj Tak to spawn hybrid clones. And then there is the South: you only have to tune in to ETV, or Sun Music or one of Kerala’s brightly coloured channels to realize that their visual culture has a different ethos, part classical, part gaudy.