Southern States - Tamil Nadu-Chennai   

Subscribers in a quandary over CAS deadline

By Our Staff Reporter

CHENNAI AUG. 30. With less than a day to go, cable TV subscribers in the city were still left wondering whether at all the Conditional Access System (CAS) would survive its second deadline.

"We ourselves will have to find out by tuning in on Monday morning," said Kayal R.S.Elavarasu, president of Cable TV Urimayalargal Sangam. The delay in announcing the individual prices of the channels by the broadcasters was seen as a major impediment for the sale of the Set Top Boxes (STB).

Mr.Elavarasu who said his organisation was all for CAS, as it would pave for transparency in the monthly bills, also added that the demand for STBs would increase only after the subscribers missed their favourite programmes. The city's multi-system operators (MSOs), Sumangali Cable Vision and Hathway have already been advertising for the sale of their digital STBs. Meanwhile, voluntary organisation Exnora International has called for deferring the introduction of CAS in Chennai. "As an idea, we are not opposed to CAS, because we firmly believe that it would hand over market control to the consumers and pave way for transparency. However, we are concerned that the individual pricing of the channels are yet to announced and the roll out has been postponed in other metros due to political opposition," a statement from Exnora chairman and chief adviser to Confederation of Cable TV Subscriber Associations, M.B.Nirmal said.

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