Under the truce, Sumangali Cable Vision (a Sun TV Group company) and HathwayCable (a Rajan Raheja Group company) have decided not to cannibalise eachother's territory. Hathway initially owned 60 per cent market share, butthis was beginning to come down with the entry of Sumangali and the`political' face it presented. The market share currently rests at 50:50 onboth sides with Sumangali now allowed to go into unchartered territories.There are some suburbs of Chennai which are still being controlled byindependent cable operators who profess not to be allies of eithercompany.

Under the new arrangement, relay signals will be sent uniformly throughoutChennai from Sumangali Cable. This includes Hathway's channel called CCC.The Hathway control room will be used as a standby to Sumangali in case offailure (which was used thus on a couple of occasions). Sumangali andHathway head-ends are linked to allow for smooth uninterrupted service.Hathway was previously relaying a local cable network with local news, localcontent, interviews and other programmes on prevailing issues. The channelwas called `C' Chennai. Now this channel has been replaced by SCV.

Double benefit
While on the face of it the deal appears to be disadvantageous to Hathway-which lost its brand name-it's not quite so: the company has an arrangementto continue to provide the local content as in the past, do the marketingfor the same and get the advertisement revenues. SCV which has a number ofmovie rights (by virtue of Sun's portfolio) will relay the two to threemovies for the day on the channel, and collect revenues. The localprogramming by Hathway will go up gradually from four to eight hours. Whencontacted, Hathway's vice president E V S Chakravarthy said that `C' Chennaiwas handicapped on the movie front earlier. Also the advertisement tariffswere lower on account of the cable network operating across 60 per cent ofthe city. ``Now the single network allows for increased tariffs on accountof the wider reach of the SCV channel,'' he said. Ad revenues which wereruling at Rs 225 for 10 seconds are now to be Rs 330. Hathway pegs a revenueof Rs 15 lakh - Rs 20 lakh from the channel.

On the logistics front, despite the city operating under a virtual singlenetwork, Hathway will be responsible for its cable operators. The lattercurrently pay Rs 41 per subscriber. Sumangali on the other hand collects Rs50 from its operators. This system is likely to continue unchanged.

The territorial rights continue to hold good for Internet operations aswell. Both SCV and Hathway have plans to introduce Internet over cable andto maintain the systems and services independently. Hathway will be startingits operations in three weeks and SCV is expected to make similardeclarations at about the same time.

Both companies have also agreed to team up together and face a mutual enemy:the pay channels who are currently extorting rates from MSOs based onarbitrary targets rather than actual numbers. For this, both the MSOs areplanning to bring in addressibilty boxes in the next one year. This, whilesilencing pay channels on the one hand, will also give them actual controlon the subscriber base from the cable operators' end.