India limits HD fee structure
October 14, 2016
By Chris Forrester
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) intends limiting the amount that broadcasters can charge viewers for watching HD channels.
TRAI’s draft new consumer tariffs say that HD channels may only be charged at three times the rate of Standard Definition (SD) channels. If an existing SD channel is ‘mirrored’ by an HD version then the charge “cannot exceed three times the cost” of the SD service, says TRAI.
TRAI says the cost of HD content produced is a one-time cost and the SD feed is only a down-converted version of the same HD content at very little extra cost.