(20 February 2007 7:00 pm)

NEW DELHI: Many cable households are unhappy with repeated signal failure and Trai is now faced with the issue of what to do about enforcing Quality of Service provisions, sources tell indiantelevision.com.

One of the major confusions in the market in the national Capital is what are the cable operators doing about the billing of chosen channels.

At the moment, the operators are giving all the channels that can be shown in India, and they have been telling the subscribers, those who have filled up the forms indicating their choice, that at the end of the month, they would be charged for what they have indicated in the forms.

"The COs have told us that the programming for each STB is taking time, but they would charge each household what the latter has opted for," the official said.

He said also that the COs are watching the scenario. "They feel that in a month or two, subscribers might want to drop some channels and want others, or just want more channels than they have opted for now. So then, they would have to do the programming all over again."

The official felt that the COs want the situation to stabilise before they get into programming for "watch what you pay for".

However, in many cases, the COs have registered the subscribers and taken the advance charges at the beginning, when they gave the STBs but have so far not returned for collecting the advance fees for February.

"This means subscribers would suddenly be faced with having to pay for two months if the COs do not take the fees for February now," said an official, agreeing that all this is causing more confusion than is good for the ongoing Cas rollout to regain the traction it has lost quite a bit of recently.

One MSO is not showing contact numbers in the appropriate window when the signal goes off, and still signal loss is quite a regular phenomenon and, though less than in the beginning, there is a lot of pixelisation of images.

The MSOs have so far not raised the issue of QoS being enforced, for reasons best known to them. But they are aware that this is one of the reasons for not just slowdown of Cas rollout, but in many cases, people wanting to return the boxes and settle for just the FTAs.

In a report last week, indiantelevision,com had reported the worries amongst MSOs on these issues, and their informing Trai that broadcasters and they themselves need to do attractive packaging and ensure QoS, but nothing seems to have materialised so far.

Also Read:
CAS REVIEW: MSOs claim adequate STB stocks, admit consumer order slowdown