The Hindu : PMO officials meet cable operators

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Jul 03, 2003

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PMO officials meet cable operators

By Anita Joshua

NEW DELHI JULY 2. With all the stake-holders to the Conditional Access System (CAS) working at cross-purposes, the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) today once again intervened to break the deadlock that has already weakened the Government's resolve to rollout the new regime in cable television in four cities with its punitive clauses on July 15. While the PMO has so far interacted only with the Information and Broadcasting Ministry on CAS, its officials today met broadcasters and cable operators separately to discuss various aspects of its implementation — particularly the price factor.

Even as the Ministry spent a greater part of the day weighing its options, the broadcasters were one in maintaining that "dual feed" was the only viable option given the fact that the Set-Top Boxes (STBs) — needed to access pay channels post-CAS — are not available in adequate numbers. However, the Multi System Operators (MSOs) — while conceding that a `dual feed' is technically possible — argued that it was not practical.

Though the broadcasters have suggested `dual feed' option as a transitory mechanism till an adequate supply of STBs is assured, MSOs and cable operators are opposing the proposal on the premise that they would have to put in place a parallel network and incur huge costs. "Such an investment is pointless, and why should we pay the price for no fault of ours as it is the broadcasters who are stalling the process,'' is their contention.

Refusing to say what lay ahead for television-viewers and wary of divulging details on their interaction with the PMO, all that the broadcasters were willing to say was that the rates quoted by the cable operators were misleading and a "figment of someone's imagination''. On Tuesday, cable operators had said that if `dual feed' was introduced, then those who opted to continue with the existing system would have to cough up Rs. 530 a month.

However, some Mumbai-based "Shiv Sena-backed'' operators — who met officials in the PMO today — said they had been told that CAS would be rolled out in a phased manner. How such a staggered roll-out would be implemented was not made clear to them, but some of the proposals that were discussed at a separate meeting between the MSOs and the Ministry included `genre-wise' encryption of pay channels.

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