Indian broadcasting: Digital days ahead 

Manufacturing of high-end broadcast equipment in India is negligible. There are few companies who are manufacturing themselves or through joint ventures by some foreign companies. Bharat Electronics Ltd is a major player in the radio/TV transmission equipment market in India, followed by C-DAC and Gujarat Communication and Electronics Ltd. The ministry of information technology has clubbed broadcast equipment under communication and broadcast. Within the broadcasting sector it broadly includes digital broadcasting of audio and video, broadband access, digital compression, digital storage and retrieval, hard disk-based and optical technologies.

Indigenous manufacturers mostly dominate manufacturing in the CATV equipment segment, which is a highly disorganized segment. Equipment mainly includes head-ends, amplifiers, splitters, etc. The gray market also caters substantially to the CATV equipment. This segment is very cost sensitive and the CATV operators are not ready to shell out more for better quality equipment from reputed manufactures. Scientific Atlanta, Barconet and Motorola GI are major suppliers of CATV equipment. The cable industry faces an imminent threat from the launch of DTH services, though the operator's association denies any immediate impact on their business. 

With the broadband network coming up with the creation of bandwidth capacity, there is also talk of television channels being streamed on the Internet. This is an opportunity, which will of course take a lot of time before it becomes a reality.

The government has allotted frequency to 25 top bidders for FM stations. 

Most of the equipment manufactures are more than satisfied with the fast pace of reforms on the broadcast front and are hopeful of the upcoming communication convergence bill in the parliament. The permission to allow uplinking from India and the decision to permit DTH services in Ku-Band has sent the right signals to the industry. Despite this, very few channels like Sun and Eenadu have actually set up an earth station to uplink their channels. In Singapore, one uplinking center is capable of playing upto 16 channels each. 

Value-added services

With the creation of substantial optic fiber backbone, especially in the metros, opportunity exists for the cable operators to utilize this to offer value-added services like Internet on TV to customers. Already, companies like Spectranet and Mantra in Delhi and In2Cable and Hathaway in Mumbai have started offering these services. But surprisingly, despite all the benefits, the response has been very poor and the number of subscribers is very low. This can be attributed to the clear-cut failure of marketing strategies adopted by these companies. They have not been able to make subscribers aware of the advantages that these services offer them. Added to this is the high cost of access products like set-top boxes. 

The chances of MSOs becoming local exchange carriers for basic operators is also an area which holds lot of promise, if regulatory hurdles are cleared. Once interactivity becomes a reality, operators will be in a position to provide several other services like pay-per-view, home shopping, multiple viewing angles, near video on demand and games. This will lead to the next stage where video on demand, home banking, tele-working and even telephony and video conferencing could be provided.

Future perfect

Intensifying competition on the broadcasting front has resulted in new, emerging opportunities for everybody--the broadcaster, equipment manufacturers, production houses and above all, the subscriber. This has also resulted in bad blood between broadcasters and cable operators, which is an ominous sign. The battle is on for the ground. The ongoing tussle between Star and Siticable is an expression of that. Siti is said to be blocking Star's channels on their network. Cable operators are also peeved at arbitrary pays channel costs. It is these irritants which need to be overcome. One can only hope that the independent regulator, which the new bill envisages, will take care of this issue.

Sudesh Prasad


Source: www.voicendata.com