Advanced Television

India confirms digitisation timetable

November 17, 2011

By Chris Forrester

India’s government passed the Cable TV Networks Regulations earlier in November and now has issued the dates by which time all cable operators in the country must digitise their systems.

It has permitted the initial dates to slip a little but now says that India’s 4 major cities must have completed their analogue to digital conversion by June 30 2012. The rest of the nation’s larger cities (of more than 1m population) can take until September 30 2014 to complete their swap-out. The rest of the country, right down to the smallest system, has until December 2014 to make the change.

The Phase 2 (1m) cities are Bangalore, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Pune, Surat, Kanpur, Jaipur, Lucknow, Nagpur, Patna, Indore, Bhopal, Thane, Ludhiana, Agra, Pimpri-Chinchwad, Nashik, Vadodara, Faridabad, Ghaziabad, Rajkot, meerut, Kalyan-Dombivali, Varanasi, amrtisar, Navi Mumbai, Aurangabad, Solapur, Allahabad, Jabalpur, Srinagar, Visakhapatnam, Ranchi, Howrah, Chandigarh, Coimbatore, Maysore and Jodhpur.

Small systems will not be allowed to slip beyond the specified dates. Cable operators must be registered and the government says that cablecos which have not completed their changeover will not be permitted an operating licence.

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