CAS Is The First Step In A Long March: Secy

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New Delhi: : Information and broadcasting secretary Pawan Chopra has said that conditional access system (CAS) is “the first step in ending the helplessness” felt by millions of consumers of cable and satellite (C&S) television. Defending his ministry’s commitment to keeping consumer interest paramount, Mr Chopra said there is little that can be done to address the ground-level monopoly of individual cable operators in one go. “We know this can’t happen with conditional access alone. True choice, we hope, will come once (Prasar Bharati and some private players) bring direct-to-home television into India.”

“What CAS will therefore do is to separate pay channel payments from cable service charges. It will reduce the bill of people who wish to watch only free to air (FTA) channels. It will bring a box into the picture so that you pay only for the channels you watch. And, most important of all, it will introduce transparent costing and a play of market forces among pay channels,” Mr Chopra told FE.

On a candid note, the secretary said that “we (the I&B ministry) underestimated the opposition to CAS,” because “we thought—after all—that the legislation had been approved after extensive debate.” Also, CAS had been demanded by consumer groups, broadcasters, and cable operators and “all we had done was to tailor it to Indian conditions.”

On hindsight, Mr Chopra wished he had been tougher with the C&S industry when they stonewalled his ministry over what the consumer should expect out of CAS.

The issues where his ministry failed to extract information include which channels will remain FTA and which will go pay, the monthly charges of those which will be pay, the preparedness of multi-service operators over the import of set top boxes, indeed, the terms on which these boxes will be sold/ rented, and how many FTA channels beyond the mandatory 30 would individual cable operators end up showing.

“People fear that they will see only 30 channels in the basic tier. The truth is that almost all cable operators have a capacity to show 60-80 channels. Hardly 20 will be kept aside for pay channels. The remaining will be FTA. So, thanks to CAS, you may well get 40-60 FTA channels in the basic tier itself.”