It’s the time to speculate. TRAI, The regulator is in a mood to regulate and we all wait for what is there in store for each one of us. The regulation they are touching upon, once finalized may change the whole media scene. Consultation papers were issued last month on subjects like “Whether IP TV should be permitted on cable networks”, “MDU to be part of DTH”, “Interconnect Issues”, “Proposed Interconnect Agreement between Broadcaster, MSOs and Franchisees”, “Quality of Services Norms in CAS”, etc. I am sure the stakeholders must be fed up with replying to all these consultation papers but they are all so important that I feel, TRAI should have thought of releasing them with more spacing as it is impossible to do justice to these regulations in a short period of few days. Number of stakeholders I talked to, didn’t even know if there were attempts to regulate them.
In the above context, I will like to blame the cable operators for not adequately responding to such consultation papers when they affect them the most. There are hardly any comments from them except Cable Operators Federation who are very regular in reacting to the regulatory measure affecting the Industry.
This is the time for consolidated broadcast regulation like the Broadcast Bill. All these piecemeal regulatory measures must lead to such an Act of law soon if positive growth is aimed. Another factor to be considered is effect of convergence on each type of service. We must permit all services to all types of service providers whether they are cable operators, fixed line operators, Mobile operators or Wireless operators. This will virtually combine all the existing infrastructure into one and achieve the targets of digitalization much faster.
Broadcast Asia, biggest Industry event in the region held in Singapore last month was a big draw for the Indian players. During the four-day exhibition and conference one could feel the theme of convergence all over. TV on mobile demonstrations were great. Protection of Intellectual Property Rights was another subject much in discussion in the realer of new services like IPTV, content on the net and wireless broadband. Overall one had much to learn during the event.
We are all waiting for the big DTH boom now. The hype created around the launch of Tata-Sky has increased consumers hopes but drowned the morale of Cable Operators. Dish TV, in the mean time, is having a good time signing new customers every day after SONY package joined them. Delay in the launch of Tata-Sky is proving a boon for them.
This issue of Cable Quest is a Digital Special where we handle the subject from the very basics to the more technical part of setting up a Digital Headend and many more. Hope our readers like such special issues. We always wait for your response to the new changes that we bring to your favourite magazine every month.
No comments:
Post a Comment