Delhi HC: Bring some rationality on carriage fee

[PRATHAM]

The Delhi High Court has sought responses from the Information and Broadcasting (I&B) ministry and the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) on a petition seeking regulation of fee charged by multi-system operators (MSOs), cable operators and DTH operators to carry a particular channel on their platform.

While issuing notices to I&B ministry and TRAI, Justice G S Sistani expressed the need to have rationality in fixing the charges. "There has to be some rationality. It is not that the court is deciding to frame regulation," the court said, when the counsel appearing for TRAI contended that the court should refrain from interfering in the matter.

The court was hearing the petition, filed by Delhi-based news channel Total TV, challenging the validity of carriage fees being charged by DTH operators, distributors, MSOs, cable operators. Total TV approached the court after Prasar Bharati hiked the carriage fee from Rs 25 lakh to Rs 60 lakh per annum to carry the channel on its DTH platform.

Total TV's counsel submitted that when TRAI has not prescribed any carriage fees to be charged by distributors, the same is to be held as illegal demand and such type of practice should be deprecated and discouraged. The channel questioned the basis for fixing such charge when there were no norms or guidelines laid down by the government.

It shall be noted that the carriage fee has become a bitter pinch for the broadcasters. The Indian carriage fee market is pegged at around Rs 1,000 crore. DTH operators Dish TV and Tata Sky ask for substantial carriage fee between Rs 3 crore and Rs 5 crore, sources said.

When contacted by Televisionpoint.com, both Tata Sky and Dish TV spokesperson refused to comment on the company's commercial carriage agreements with its clients.

Often, the controversial TAM Media Research's Connectivity Report is blamed for the increasing distribution costs of TV channels. The Indian Broadcasting Federation (IBF) has earlier argued that the report is affecting the distribution costs.

A plethora of new TV channels are being launched, which are jostling for space on the already choked analogue cable pipe. Nearly 300 channels are chasing bandwidth that can accommodate barely 100 channels. The 'prime band', with barely 11 frequencies, and the 'colour band' with about 6 frequencies command the highest premium. This is followed by the 19 frequencies in the 'S' band.

[PRATHAM]

what is s band as shown here

[Dish]

Well I read about S Band 2 days ago in wiki which suggest:

The S band ranges from 2 to 4 GHz, crossing the (artificial) boundary between UHF and SHF at 3.0 GHz.