Southern States - Tamil Nadu-Chennai   

STAR channels back in some parts of city

By Karthik Subramanian

CHENNAI APRIL 29. The STAR bouquet of channels, including STAR Movies, STAR Plus, STAR Vijay and National Geographic, were back in some parts of the city on Monday night after a blackout on the Sumangali Cable Vision (SCV) network for exactly a month.

By Tuesday afternoon, the channels were restored in most parts of the city. When contacted, a senior SCV official said their problem with the STAR was `amicably' resolved. The STAR group spokesperson here, however, did not offer any explanation on how the issue was resolved.

While several subscribers in the city were happy to get back the STAR bouquet, they were still in doubt whether the operators should be paid less for last month when the channels were not available. The earlier announcement by STAR to sever its link with SCV was made at a press conference even while the latter maintained that the problem was `internal' and needed to be sorted out across the table.

STAR officials kept stating that the delinking was primarily because of under declaration of connections and non-payment of dues by SCV. It was not clear today whether STAR had arrived at an acceptable declaration of the number of points, before restoring its service to SCV.

But after dragging consumers into the problem, the sudden and unannounced move by STAR has left the subscribers with several unanswered questions. "The situation now has proved that subscribers are victimised because of quarrel between broadcasters and multi-system operators. The State Government must immediately step in and set up a regulatory authority", said consumer activist, N.L.Rajah.

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