Indian TV Viewers Could Soon Switch Service Provider With Ease

The Task Force is to deliberate on ways to bring in interoperability to the STBs, he added.

He also urged that STBs should be affordably priced for the benefit of the consumer.

He said that domestic manufacturers can produce the boxes at competitive rates with the telecom ministry having declared the equipment as Telecom Network Equipment.

He said with this move, for which he said Telecom Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad had moved very fast to get it done, the manufacturers would get a level playing field with the foreign manufacturers. For phases I and II, the STBs had been mostly imported.

Javadekar said that 16 crore TV sets would have been digitized by the end of the fourth phase.

Under the earlier plan for digitization, the third phase was to end by September this year and the fourth phase by Dec 31, 2014.

The total number of TV households in India is around 160 million. The first and second phases of cable digitization covered all the metros and 38 cities with a population of over one million.

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