I&B Ministry
I&B Ministry to study why MSOs are not taking indigenous STBs
NEW DELHI: The Information and Broadcasting Ministry (I&B) will facilitate a meeting of manufacturers of indigenous set top boxes (STBs) and multi-system operators (MSOs) next week in view of complaints by the manufacturers that no orders were being placed for their STBs.
This was decided at a meeting of the Task Force which will oversee the next two phases of digital addressable system (DAS) and which met under the chairmanship of Ministry Additional Secretary J S Mathur here today.
Earlier this week, the manufacturers had met Ministry secretary Bimal Julka and made the same complaint.
The participants were apprised that around 3.5 households had to be covered in the third phase of digitisation.
A Ministry source told indiantelevision.com that the meeting discussed various roadblocks on the road to full digitisation and ways to overcome these hurdles.
Star India legal & regulatory senior vice president Pulak Bagchi, who is also the representative of the broadcasters said emphatically that broadcasters would support voluntary transition to DAS as long as there were some ground rules.
He also said that broadcasters were prepared to give concessions to operators switching over to DAS provided the operators totally stopped analogue transmission.
Bagchi also said that it should be made mandatory that any MSO or local cable operator who switches over to DAS should switch off analogue and not run both systems.
The meeting was attended by around 20 people and included representatives of trade bodies like FICCI and CII, apart from MSOs, LCOs and DAS advisor Yogendra Pal.
MUMBAI: When the numbers go silent, the noise on screen gets a little harder to measure. Ministry of Information and Broadcasting has extended the suspension of television rating data for news channels, directing Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) to withhold TRPs for another four weeks. The latest order, issued on March 31, 2026, builds on an earlier directive from March 6 that had paused ratings for a month. The ministry has clarified that the blackout will continue for four weeks or until further instructions are issued whichever comes earlier keeping the industry in a prolonged state of data drought.
The reasoning, officials suggest, lies far beyond domestic screens. With geopolitical tensions in West Asia continuing to escalate, the government has flagged concerns over how such developments could influence news consumption and presentation. The move is aimed at curbing excessive sensationalism and speculative coverage during what it describes as a sensitive global moment.
For the broadcast ecosystem, the absence of Television Rating Points (TRPs) is more than symbolic, it removes the industry’s primary scorecard. Ratings dictate advertising flows, shape editorial strategies and fuel the competitive pecking order among news channels. Without them, broadcasters are effectively operating without a public performance benchmark.
The timing only adds to the complexity. Amid a high-intensity global news cycle, channels must now navigate audience engagement without the weekly feedback loop that typically drives programming decisions. Advertisers, too, are left recalibrating, leaning on proxies such as brand strength, reach and distribution instead of hard viewership data.
While framed as a temporary regulatory intervention tied to maintaining public order, the extended suspension underscores a broader unease about the tone and direction of news coverage. For now, the ratings race is on pause but the battle for attention continues, just without a scoreboard.
