Like the month of June, July also kept us busy in hectic activities in the Industry. First of all, it was the open house discussions of TRAI on numerous consultation papers issued in June, then there were the two major Court Cases, one between the MSOs and the Ministry of I&B that decided the implementation of CAS with immediate effect and the second between Dish-TV and Star TV where TDSAT gave a landmark ruling of sharing of content between the two DTH platforms, cost of the content package to be 50% of the cost on cable and the third major happening was the release of Draft Broadcast Bill that created a commotion amongst the Broadcasters with its proposals of cross-media restrictions, mandatory time slot for social programming, public service advertising and mandatory percentage of content sourced from India by all foreign channels and restriction on market share of broadcasters as well as MSOs.
After the Delhi High Court’s strict order to implement CAS by 31 Dec 2006, I don’t think there is any way now for the government to avoid this. TRAI is already busy in drafting regulations for the CAS areas. Government has already issued the Notification on CAS with a number of changes in the Cable Television Act. Lets hope this time that CAS gets implemented and the Cable Industry gets a level playing field with DTH.
Surprisingly, all broadcasters know that these are very normal terms of operation which most of the countries in the world are supporting, still they call these as ‘Draconian’, ‘Stringent’ and ‘Muzzling’ as reported in the print as well as electronic media. Lobbying against these proposed legislations have already started. The I&B Minister would now like to talk to the stakeholders before presenting the Bill in the Parliament Session. That means, it is very unlikely that this Bill will see the light of the day in near future. Regulatory battles will keep going on endlessly in any industry. However progress should not stop. This is the time to make value addition to our networks. The whole world is doing so. If we do not adopt new technologies, we will be left far behind. The Telecom companies are trying out triple play, Video-on-Demand and VOIP etc. Cable companies too, must get serious about making their infrastructure ‘two-way’. There are many new technologies available to achieve this, like Wimax, Ethernet (Midas) and simple return path on co-axial cables. This will enable applications like VOD, Video Conferencing, Interactive game and e-governance on their existing networks. DTH operators too are adding value to their network with interactive games and Video-on-Demand. We carry a lot of information about these value added services in this issue.
In the mean time, The Buzz is that Tata-Sky will launch on 8 August.
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