Digital cable and beyond

It’s clearly an exciting yet challenging time to be one of India’s cable operators. The move to digital has had a good start and the regulated ASO is scheduled to continue at pace. Media Partners Asia (MPA) predicts that just as analogue switch-off provided a digital dividend in western countries the same will happen in India, with predictions for Indian cable revenues jumping from $4.2 billion in 2011 to $6.4 billion by 2020. Clearly as well as leading to increased revenues, the move to digital cable causes disruption too. For instance some local operators may form cooperatives or move from last mile distribution to becoming sales operations for the larger operators and MSOs. Everyone from the MSO through to the consumer there’s going to be a need to purchase new digital equipment, from digital head-ends, edge network QAM delivery to set-top boxes for the home. The data enabled by digital CAS will be a game changer to track subscription levels and provide viewer information to allow operators to tailor their TV offering to their audience.

Broadcast Asia, Singapore-2013 Show Preview

Conference line-up will spotlight new topics, an impressive assemblage of speakers and interactive dialogues for discerning content producers

Chinese Cable Networks set an Example with Triple Play

By Mr. Yanjun

CTO, Chengdu Guangda

DIGITISATION for whom?

Hemant UpadhyayAdvisor-IT & Telecom,Consumer VOICE

All cable TV consumers beware- government of India by amending THE CABLE TELEVISION NETWORKS (REGULATION) ACT, 1995 on 25th October 2011 and by notification dated 11th November 2011 has made it mandatory for all cable television service providers to provide only digital and encrypted signals to their consumers. The time table for this Digital Access System (DAS) has also been notified which prescribes that DAS should be implemented in 4 metros (Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata) by 30th June, 2012 (finally done on 30th October, 2012), other major cities by 31st March 2013 and rest of the country by 31st December, 2014.

MIDDLEWARE as VAS Software Key driver for monetizing DAS CATV network

As cable TV digitization gains momentum, monetization through TV value-added services will grow exponentially. Middleware plays a crucial role in enabling those value added services apart from providing state of the art User Xperience for content navigation and search. This article puts forward implementation and operation support strategies for digital TV value-added services on a middleware platform in three aspects viz: Service Deployment, Service Recommendation, and Service Management & Control.

Choosing the right CAS partner

It is important for an operator, upgrading from analogue to digital (DAS) to choose a solution that is compliant with the TRAI regulations and other official requirements, now and in the future. It is also important for the operator to choose a supplier that takes a long term responsibility for the products, giving the operator necessary support and upgrade of functionality in the future. Likewise it is important to choose a solution that is based on existing open standards to avoid hidden expenses related to expensive third party solutions. This is very important due to changes in the regulations over the time. This is particularly important when choosing the CAS-partner.

Where is the Transparency?

Praveen Chitnis

MSOs are not giving any official acknowledgement to LCO for number of boxes given, hence LCO is not able to provide bill to his costumer. The forms are provided by MSO and for their own Data. There is no guarantee that the MSO will declare the full connectivity to Government. 

FTTx Supercharges Broadband Deployment

More than 50 million new broadband subscribers added in 2012 News Highlights: 

Delivering anytime Content on Cable

Mark Christie, Chief Technology Officer, KIT Digital

Audiences now demand access to content at a time that suits them, not when the broadcasters want to show it. From the days of the VCR, consumers have been able to time-shift their selected favourites. Now they want to be able to choose from a wider selection, without deciding in advance what they will record: catch-up television.

LCO torn between Government & Consumers

Col. KK Sharma

According to a report presented to parliament by information & broadcasting minister Manish Tewari on 26 April, the level of cable television digitisation in 38 cities in 14 states and one union territory of Phase II has touched 89.8 per cent, including 28.33 per cent DTH homes as on 21 April, three weeks after analogue switch-off.

Monopolies in Media must be curbed

Roop Sharma

Curbing monopolies in media is extremely important for a country like India where gap between the rich and the poor is too wide. To improve our economy we need to decrease this gap by giving more opportunities to small and medium enterprises and self employed people to grow. This can only happen when we curb vertical monopolies of large enterprises by restricting cross media holdings. This is more important for the Media industry which has the power to change the mindset of people at large. 

Cable: Grasping the Multiscreen Opportunity

Digitisation of cable TV Networks have set the ball rolling for unlimited opportunities to leverage the IP technology for monetizing providing new value added services to legacy cable consumers. This article is based on a white paper by  Farncombe sponsored by NAGRA.

One Network-Multiple Services

Introduction to Next Generation Networks (NGN) the future of telecom

Satya N. Gupt

In the current scenario of economic meltdown and cut-throat competition Telecom Operators are in need of ways of providing multiple services over their networks to demanding customers to address the problem of falling average revenues (ARPU) as the voice services penetrates to lower and lower income levels. To establish multiple networks to serve the same customer base for multiple services does not make a business case as it is very inefficient. Could there be a single network that could serve ever widening range of services? The answer is the Next Generation Networks which is a converged network. All based on Internet Protocol (IP).

May 2013

1/5/13 -- Real estate company Sahana Group's Marathi news channel Jai Maharashtra launched.

Time to move ahead with Digital Networks

I&B Ministry might be rejoicing over its success in achieving 87% of STB penetration in Phase-II of Mandatory Digitisation that ended on 31st March 2013, consumers and LCOs are still struggling to come to terms with what is happening on the ground. Many local cable operator associations have been protesting with cable blackouts and hunger strikes but all this is falling on deaf ears of the government. Their main grouse is that till now they were independent businessmen making a living out of last mile cable network but now Government has given the control of their business to MSOs including their revenues.