Digitisation with Star News

The Star News channel, which is produced by New Delhi Television, is presently not available to a lot of operators in the city, and according to Nitin Dhar, area sales manager, Star TV, decoders have been sold to some operators while others have booked theirs. 8220;There is a shortage of decoders because they have to be imported and then sent here from Delhi, but as and when they become available, cable operators will have access to them,8221; he said.

Digitisation which assures better sound and picture quality has come at a price, which not every operator can afford. The decoder comes at a hefty cost of Rs 40,000 per channel for operators. Signals which used to come free have now been encrypted, and in layman8217;s terms we can say, a decoder is required to break the lock of the signal, explains Thyagarajan. The cost of accessing all 11 channels,is expected to be around Rs 6 lakh.

Encrypting takes about five days, during which period the channel is off the air. At the moment cable operators are forming groups of 15 and going in for one set of decoders with no plans to pass this on to subscribers, he assures. Star TV finally aims to provide all channels through one decoder to individual subscribers, which means stiff competition for cable operators who have to buy separate decoders for all five channels.