Thakur
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Concerned with the exorbitant pricing of high-definition (HD) channels, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) is seeking stakeholders’ opinion whether the price of HD channels should be regulated to protect the interests of the consumers.
In its consultation paper ‘Tariff issues related to TV services’, the regulator is examining if there is a rationale behind the abnormally high price of HD channels vis-à-vis the SD channels.
Presently, there is forbearance on HD channel pricing and the broadcasters are free to fix the price for HD channels.
The HD channels are priced many multiples of SD channels despite the fact that broadcasters do not incur any major costs on HD channels except the bandwidth cost for uplinking.
These days, the TRAI said, broadcasters do not have to incur additional costs on production.
The content on SD and HD channels is the same. In fact, almost all HD channels are mirror image of SD channels in terms of content except the scheduling, which might vary.
Making matters worse, the HD channels, which were initially ad free and were completely dependent upon subscription revenues, have also begun to carry quite a few advertisements.
Noting that the price ratios of HD and SD channels in terms of RIO rates for similar content is exorbitantly high, thereby indicating large price differential, TRAI said that there does not appear a valid justification for pricing HD channels abnormally high.
Therefore, there is a need to define some relationship between the price of the HD channel and the price of the SD channel and it should be notified transparently.
It said that the distribution platform operators (DPOs) have brought out that broadcasters produce content in HD format and down convert to SD format for distribution to subscribers considering that many subscribers as of now have only SD compatible STBs.
Read more at: http://www.televisionpost.com/trai-tdsat/trai-mulls-regulating-hd-channel-price/ | TelevisionPost.com
In its consultation paper ‘Tariff issues related to TV services’, the regulator is examining if there is a rationale behind the abnormally high price of HD channels vis-à-vis the SD channels.
Presently, there is forbearance on HD channel pricing and the broadcasters are free to fix the price for HD channels.
The HD channels are priced many multiples of SD channels despite the fact that broadcasters do not incur any major costs on HD channels except the bandwidth cost for uplinking.
These days, the TRAI said, broadcasters do not have to incur additional costs on production.
The content on SD and HD channels is the same. In fact, almost all HD channels are mirror image of SD channels in terms of content except the scheduling, which might vary.
Making matters worse, the HD channels, which were initially ad free and were completely dependent upon subscription revenues, have also begun to carry quite a few advertisements.
Noting that the price ratios of HD and SD channels in terms of RIO rates for similar content is exorbitantly high, thereby indicating large price differential, TRAI said that there does not appear a valid justification for pricing HD channels abnormally high.
Therefore, there is a need to define some relationship between the price of the HD channel and the price of the SD channel and it should be notified transparently.
It said that the distribution platform operators (DPOs) have brought out that broadcasters produce content in HD format and down convert to SD format for distribution to subscribers considering that many subscribers as of now have only SD compatible STBs.
Read more at: http://www.televisionpost.com/trai-tdsat/trai-mulls-regulating-hd-channel-price/ | TelevisionPost.com
