Cable TV tariff change on hold

TT, : The national telecom regulator has put on hold a new tariff regime in television homes that was to come into effect from Friday midnight amid confusion about the migration process.

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) has ordered service providers to see to it that no pay channels are withdrawn from any cable home on December 29.

Sources said the decision to defer implementation of the new regime -- in which subscribers would have to choose each channel they wished to see and pay for them -- was forced by the fact that none of the states had made much progress in the migration process.

Under the new system, customers would get 100 free to air channels at Rs 153 per month. For those wishing to watch pay channels, they would have to pick channels individually at a fixed monthly and pay for them over and above the freeto-air fee.

"The authority (TRAI)… hereby advises that all broadcasters/DPOs (distribution platform operators)/LCOs (local cable operators) to ensure that any channel that a consumer is watching today is not discontinued on 29.12.2018," Trai said in a release on its website on Wednesday afternoon.

DPO is a term used to refer to multi-system operators and DTH platforms together.

The Telecommunication (Broadcasting And Cable) Services (Eighth) (Addressable Systems) Tariff Order, 2017 was first notified in March 2017 and re-notified on July 3, 2018 after a legal battle.

The cable industry had time from July till December this year to complete the migration process, which would involve MSOs and DTH platforms finding out the choices of pay channels of individual subscribers and updating it on their software.

As a result of the TRAI order, subscribers would now get more time to look at various options and pick channels or bouquets they want to watch without the fear of their favourite channels disappearing from TV screens.

The release goes on to say subscribers would get "ample opportunity" to make an informed choice. It does not name another date for the new system to come into effect.

At the time of digitisation, too, when set-top boxes replaced analogue connections, the original deadline of October 31, 2012 could not be met and the transition had taken till February 15 to be completed in Calcutta.

Till Wednesday's order was issued, pay channels would have gone off from a particular connection on the stroke of midnight on Friday if the list of selected channels was not updated in the server of the MSO of DTH operator.

Some cable operators had started distributing forms for subscribers to fill-up with a rate chart of pay channels. There was a problem here, because most of these forms did not contain the bouquets offered by some broadcasters..