Sector regulator Trai Friday has been told by its players that almost all cable TV consumers have either chose their channel preferences or had moved to ‘best fit plan’ under the new tariff regime. Trai met with distribution platform owners (DPOs) on Friday as well as multi-system operators (MSO) and all major DTH players, to review the progress of migration of TV viewers under the new framework.
Gupta also said that the authority has reviewed the progress of the switch with all large DPOs. As per inputs provided by DPOs, near 100 per cent consumers of cable TV homes have migrated to the new framework either based on options of preference or as per ‘best fit plan’. Among DTH service homes, over 43 per cent consumers have already been migrated.
The DTH service providers have submitted to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai), which is also the regulator for broadcasting, that all subscribers of this pre-paid platform will be migrated to new framework in the next 2-3 weeks. Trai have insisted players that customer’s inconvenience during the migration process should be kept minimal. “Trai is urging subscribers to exercise their options to select TV channels of their choice, immediately.
DPOs have been instructed to execute the options of subscribers at the earliest,” he said. Early in this month, the regulator had extended the timeline for consumers to make their channel preferences till March 31, 2019. At the same time, Trai had asked all DPOs to create ‘best fit plan’ for its subscribers who have not exercised their options yet.
The ‘best fit plan’ shall be tweaked on the basis of consumers’ usage pattern, language spoken and popularity of channels, Trai had said. The regulator had said that subscribers will be free to change their best fit plan at any date and time on or before March 31, 2019 and the DPO will change their best fit plan into a desired pack (opted by the consumer) within 72 hours of subscribers making their channel preferences known.
