The government has formed an inter-ministerial group (IMG) to formulate a policy and regulatory framework on Internet protocol TV (IPTV) to remove ambiguities surrounding the services.
The IMG comprise telecom, IT and information and broadcasting secretaries, who will meet next week and look into framing regulations for IPTV.
The move has been necessitated by the fact that at present there is no policy and regulatory framework for IPTV but some of the operators have launched the service while the others are conducting trial runs.
Last year, state-owned MTNL was the first to start IPTV services in Delhi and Mumbai by taking a cable broadcast licence in addition to its licence for operating telecom services. Following this, Trai had written to the government for clarity on IPTV services.
IPTV is one of the major emerging distribution platforms for digital television content and is expected to prove a serious threat to the direct-to-home (DTH) and conditional access system (CAS) platforms due to its ability to provide triple play – voice, data (broadband) and TV. These are not available on CAS or DTH.
IPTV is essentially the delivery of television content via the Internet without breaks in transmission. There has been close to $4 billion in investment in IPTV and DTH services so far.
In India, IPTV is considered to be in a nascent stage and is expected to grow alongside DTH and CAS.