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HITS hits broadcasters
By siliconindia
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Wednesday, 16 July 2008, 00:46 IST
New Delhi: All broadcasters have been ordered by the government to share their feed with the new cable distribution platforms, Headend-In-The-Sky(HITS), which is licenced to Wire & Wireless India Ltd (WWIL) , IPTV and Mobile TV. However, the policy for these new platforms are yet to be brought in by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. Currently, these broadcasters represents about 350-plus television channels that are currently allowed to be beamed on cable and direct-to-home (DTH) platforms, reported Business Standard.
The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting(I&B), have made it mandatory for various channels like the STAR Channels(distributed by STAR-DEN) and Sony bouquet(MSM Discovery), as they were not sharing their channels with Headend-in-the-Sky (HITS). HITS is a new digital delivery platform to distribute pay TV signals to all cable operators, serving millions of cable homes throughout India. As per the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai),WWIL would ultimately roll out HITS across all the 55-cities listed by the broadcast regulator, for the proposed CAS rollout. Moreover, the operators of IPTV(Bharati, Reliance Communications and and MTNL) or Mobile TV(Doordarshan) can demand any channels, till an over-all policy is issued for all the new platforms, irrespective of it being in trial-phase.
Dish TV is the first private DTH company in the country launched in late 2004, while WWIL will become the first cable company to have launched HITS starting July-end. Though both are technologically similar, DTH transmits the signnals to the television directly via a sattellite, and through HITS, the cable operator receives the channels via a satellite and then pushes them to the consumers through a set-top box. This is considered to be faster and cost-effective technology to enforce both conditional access system (CAS) and the digitalisation of analogue cable.
The policy for the new cable platforms are awaited by many, especially, by the Digital Entertainment Networks (DEN), the joint venture company with STAR India, who is also interested in launching their own HITS platform.
