Ineffectual regulation

BY sevanti ninan| IN Law and Policy | 13/09/2006

Reprinted from The Hindu, September 10, 2006

MEDIA MATTERS

Sevanti Ninan

BROADCAST regulation in India swings between being draconian and ineffectual. It excels in overreaching and getting nowhere. Its makers and keepers have the urge to flex their muscles but not the spine to enforce a basic regulatory framework. You just have to look at the most recent developments to see why.

As the advertisement, which has spectacles and speakers crashing down from apartment blocks, announces, Tata-Sky`s DTH or direct to home television offering is here. A new era in TV entertainment, says its punch line. Indeed. Sounds attractive: no more snow in channels gifted by your local cable operator, no more arbitrary juggling of channels or prices. With three different DTH providers now in business, surely it`s time to consider a switch?

Well, it depends on how much of a sucker you want to be. Once you subscribe and put down money for a set top box, there is no scope for changing your mind if the service is not up to the mark. After an entire decade (the debate began at the end of 1996 when Star TV first decided to offer DTH) of discussion on set top box interoperability, DTH providers are now in the market with proprietary set top boxes which you have to buy, not rent and which will become so much junk if you decide to switch from Sky to Zee`s Dish TV or to Doordarshan`s free service.

A long list

So where is the regulator, you ask. Right here actually, with an arm-long set of recommendations on interoperability issued just late last month, on August 25. Recommendations, mind you, not orders. Tata Sky asked to beg off the interoperability requirement because it wanted to give its customers set top boxes with PVR/DVR features (Personal Video Recorders/Digital Video Recorders) which could not have interoperability because of their advanced technology. The Telecom Regulatory authority of India (TRAI) pondered over this and recommended the following.

There should not be any amendment in those articles of the DTH License Agreement which mandate technical interoperability among DTH service providers. In the same breath it said the license conditions should be amended to oblige the service provider to "inform and educate the consumers about the limited technical interoperability of the Set Top Boxes with PVR/DVR." If you are insisting on interoperability why are you asking them to tell customers why they cannot give it? Then it says in the next breath that "The DTH Service Providers should also be encouraged to provide Basic or Advanced Set Top Boxes to consumers under rental schemes, but there should be no dilution in the technical interoperability conditions as they exist today."

First, interoperability does not exist today. For Doordarshan`s DTH you can pick up any set top box available in the open market; for Tata Sky you have to buy an STB, ditto for Dish TV and these are not interchangeable. Instead of "encouraging" DTH service providers to provide basic or advanced set top boxes to consumers under rental schemes it could have "ordered" that boxes not fully interoperable be made a rental option.

Why would you want to switch operators? Because they offer different sets of channels, different packages and features. Take a look at the limitations of the Tata-Sky package. At the moment it does not offer the following: HBO, CNN, BBC, CNN-IBN, and the Zee bouquet which it is in negotiations for. But you can watch four news channels at the same time, or play six different games at the same time! Dish offers 140 channels, but no Sun TV channels, no BBC, no CNN IBN. It costs Rs. 375 a month to Tata-Sky`s Rs. 200. Its start up cost, including the STB, is Rs. 3690 to Tata`s Rs. 4550, both for three months. DD`s DTH is on its own trip, but is the only one to offer BBC World.

The basic cause of cable woes

Six days after its "recommendations" on DTH licensing, TRAI came up with an "order" on tariffs for cable channels in the cities which will have mandatory conditional access by December end, as ordered by the Delhi High Court. It fixed tariffs for channels outside the basic tier at Rs. 5 per channel of which half is to go to the cable operator. We did not protest when TRAI fixed tariffs for mobile operators, but here one must ask, should the regulator fix prices for media, or should it leave prices to market demand and simply ensure that cable operators do not under-declare the households they service, which leads some channels to overprice themselves? Our cable woes stem from the fact that cable operators are monopoly operators. If the TRAI could effect an end to this monopoly, competition would take care of prices and quality as it has in telecom, airlines, and other sectors. But where they could have made a difference, the broadcasting regulator and the government have proved totally ineffectual.