(18 March 2008 7:30 pm)

NEW DELHI: The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) has told broadcasters that they have to make their prices to the direct-to-home (DTH) operators in the non-Cas (conditional access system) competitive or else face regulatory intervention.

"We have found that prices offered to DTH players for the content given by the broadcasters is much higher than those given to cable operators. We have told them that they must give at competitive prices to DTH players," Trai advisor (broadcasting and cable services) Choubey said.

Choubey was speaking to a gathering at the Casbaa event, "India Satellite Forum - New Challenges, New Opportunities."

"The prices for content on all addressable systems must be comparable. The present practice of higher prices for DTH players as compared to those offered to cable operators is a huge deterrent for the latter," Choubey added.

Choubey said that this was done with the overall aim of Trai: to fast-track digitalisation.

Chaubey was addressing what he found were adverse comments on the regulator in the literature issued by Casbaa at the Forum, and explained the difficulties of a "converged regulator in a non-converged licensing regime".

By this he meant that the regulator was itself dealing with both broadcasting as well as telecom, and in the wake of mobile TV and IPTV coming in the situation was getting complex.

Choubey admitted that the regulation for the cable sector is "extremely heavy-handed", but said that the regulator is actually looking at "deregulating the environment at a date not far off".

"We had to set up a series of regulatory measures for cable, especially mandated Cas areas because we were bound to roll out Cas by a court order within a given date, and we were faced with a situation where cable operators may or may not get into interconnect agreements with the broadcasters," Choubey explained.

That would mean Cas never actually happening on the ground, Choubey said.

He said that Casbaa has placed the Indian regulatory regime very low in terms of stringency, but this was not the correct perspective.

"We have a situation where 6,000 MSOs tie up with 60,000 last mile operators across the country, resulting in a massively fragmented market, where the LMO has a complete monopoly. This is not the case with the countries India has been compared with." Choubey held.