CAS spells chaos in its first home

Chennai today officially became CAS’s first guinea pig. As pay channels took a bow in most cable TV homes, viewers didn’t know wha...

Chennai today officially became CAS’s first guinea pig. As pay channels took a bow in most cable TV homes, viewers didn’t know what to do next. At six in the morning, all that subscribers got to see were scrolls telling them that their respective MSOs were holding a demo of set-top boxes (STBs) in their offices. For the viewer, the dilemma began: To get or not to get an STB.

Chennai is the first city to have a roll-out of the new regulatory mechanism — the Conditional Access System. Most subscribers said they had hoped CAS would be called off. Most of them also said they had been expecting the cable operators to tell them about the procedure to buy or hire STBs, which had not happened. However, Hathway Cable’s P.S. Lakshmanan said enough awareness had been created on the issue.

Meanwhile, there was resentment that Chennai had been singled out for the treatment, with both New Delhi and Kolkata deferring it and Mumbai going in only for a partial roll-out.

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M.B. Nirmal, founder of Exnora International, wondered if Chennai was becoming the ground for some unreasonable experimentation. ‘‘Why is Chennai being made a scapegoat?’’ he asked, seeking the CM Jayalalithaa’s intervention ‘‘to say no to the Centre making TN a testing ground’’.

I&B Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad was not available for comment on the issue despite repeated attempts to reach him throughout the day.

‘‘It is us, the subscribers, who are forced to bear the brunt of non-cooperation between the broadcasters, MSOs and cable operators,’’ said S. Ramnarayan of T. Nagar, who has just gone the STB way.

A quick tour of a few areas revealed why CAS might not exactly take the city by storm. Some favourite channels stayed put with Sumangali Cable Vision (SCV) ensuring its subscribers were not deprived of them — STB or no STB.

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This morning, Raj TV followed declared it would be free for Chennai alone.

K. Suresh Kumar, deputy general manager, Hathway Cable, said the MSO had sold 860 STBs till evening and hoped to distribute 20,000 boxes, in rental and sales schemes, within the next two days. It’s believed that Chennai has eight lakh cable viewers. Going by Hathway’s STB sales and ‘‘equally unimpressive’’ figures from the other MSO, the SCV, the CAS-arithmetic is easy to guess.

While Hathway has two rental schemes and a sales offer, SCV is selling outright. According to a Federation of Cable Operators’ Association official, rental schemes are in the pipeline for SCV too.

An official of the Federation of Cable Operators’ Associations said CAS might not succeed, given the economics and also the fact cable operators themselves had not been told what their commission was, vis-a-vis pay channels.

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