Puducherry: Government of Puducherry, in its order dated 21st December 2017, has issued an ultimatum to all MSOs and LCOs to Switch off the analogue Cable TV connections within a week and transmit cable connections only through Digital Addressable System (DAS).
The notification issued by IAS Officer Dr. Satyendra Singh Dursawat stated that the govt administration has received plenty of complaints on the inaction of Cable TV Operators to comply with the Government of India’s circular dated 30th March 2017 that mandates all cable operators switch off analogue connections on 31st March 2017 and start switching over to DAS from 1st April 2017.
It also accused LCOs and MSOs that they are not showing concrete action towards switching to DAS and warned them of stringent action against erring operators under the Cable TV Networks Regulations act 1995 and Cable TV Networks Rule 1994.
While the governments are pushing the Cable TV operators to switch to DAS, the Cable Operators blame it on lack of availability of Set Top Boxes (STB) in India and international market as the reason for slow progress in Digitization process in Puducherry.
Tamil Nadu govt offering free STBs to Arasu Cable TV subscribers and mass scale acquisition of STBs through multiple vendors is also cited as a reason for the STBs demand supply issue.
While this was the genuine reason for delay, Govt officials accuse that many MSOs in these markets are using this as an excuse for the delay in switching from Analogue to Digital, whereas in reality they not taking any action to source the required volume of STBs from the markets and only a crack down on them after a week will ensure the MSOs and LCOs to hurry up towards switching to DAS.
