Indian government orders feed share
July 15, 2008
The Indian government has made it mandatory for all broadcasters — representing about 350-plus television channels that are currently allowed to be beamed on cable and direct-to-home (DTH) platforms — to share their feed with Headend-In-The-Sky (HITS), IPTV and Mobile TV, the new cable distribution platforms that have emerged recently.A clarification issued by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (I&B) makes it compulsory for all broadcasters to immediately share their channels with Wire & Wireless India (WWIL), the HITS licence holding company of Essel Group.This is significant as several broadcasters, including the STAR channels (distributed by STAR-DEN) and Sony bouquet (MSM Discovery), were not sharing their channels with Essel Group’s HITS venture that will be initially launched across 12-cities in the last week of July. WWIL would ultimately rollout HITS across all the 55-cities listed by the broadcast regulator, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai), for the proposed CAS rollout