i am mad as hell. and so would you be in my position. the cable-operator in my area has had his signal cut off by the espn-star sports channels for the last two weeks, so i have missed the australian open and the tri-series involving australia, new zealand and south africa. what makes things infinitely worse is that there is absolutely nothing i can do about it.
how did we reach this state of affairs? it has to do with the rapid growth of the cable industry in the country and the complete inability of the government to regulate it. as an economy which is being liberalised, the absence of government controls in any field should normally be a cause for celebration. if growth of an industry is market-driven, and especially so in the service section, it can only benefit the consumer. at least that is the conventional wisdom. but the cable industry has its own peculiarities, and in the absence of the government providing any frame-work within which to operate, cable operators have pretty much done what they have liked. they started small: a tiny group of people, preferably with muscle, got together in one area, bought a dish and wired up the locality by stringing cable from the top of one building to another. there are laws regarding the laying of cables, but none governing the aerial route. upto this stage, it's a case of good entrepreneurship and you can only praise it wholeheartedly. the rates charged to the consumer by the operators were also affordable, varying form one operator to another only according to the prosperity of the locality. this essentially small-scale industry changed when bigger operators came into the picture. they bought up the small operators and combined them into bigger enterprises. this, again, is an inevitable progression in a free economy and one which is expected to benefit the consumer through value-added services and greater professionalism. that, at least, was the theory. in practice, we got a different picture. the primary reason is that a cable operation is low-end technology. all you need is a dish aimed at a satellite and a distribution system. so a bigger organisation cannot give either better service or greater professionalism. what it could do, and often did do, was use its size to its own advantage. here's one example. older tv sets, which some people still have, can show only a limited number of channels, so it is an advantage for a channel to be in the first twelve numbers. who decides this? the cable operator. have you ever wondered why some pretty obscure channels are in this initial grouping? that's because the cable operator, using his size-related clout, is taking money as "carriage fees". in other words, instead of paying a fee to the channel for getting the feed, the operator charges the channel for carrying it! most of us could have lived with this arm-twisting because most households have gradually been moving to newer sets which have a large channel carrying capacity. but the real problem arose when channels, which were free to air initially, became pay channels. this was inevitable because channels aren't run for charity; they need money to make programmes and, ultimately, they need to make a profit. earlier, their only revenue came from advertising and the advertising budget of this country is simply not large enough to keep so many channels going. so becoming a pay channel was the only way out. this is where you have to make a choice. are you willing to pay for your tv programmes? be it sports, news, analysis, information or entertainment, television in our country gives us an incredible choice of options, equal or better than what most countries have. today all the channels put together are asking each household to pay a total sum of around rs 200 per month. that's the cost of four cinema tickets. for the price of four cinema tickets, you get over 50 channels for a whole month! what could be better value for money? you and i can see that. you and i can also see, that freed of the need to rely only on advertising revenues, and therefore on the ratings which each show gets, channels will have the option to make better and more varied (and some even serious) programmes. but the cable operators, who are only the middle-men, play spoilsport. many of them cheat: they collect money from a thousand households and declare to the channel that they serve only a hundred! many of them show completely illegally the latest indian and foreign films, even as they are running in cinema halls, thus crippling film producers. and some of them, like my cable operator, takes money from me, but won't show me the espn-star sports channels because he wants to keep earning his fat profit. worse, by the use of muscle, he ensures that no other cable operator comes into the area so that he enjoys a complete monopoly. we have to take these operators to court. we have to stop paying our subscriptions till they restore to us the services we are paying for. we have to press the government to bring in legislation so that cable operators follow the same laws that the new telephone companies have to follow. which basically will mean that each household can choose between two to three rival cable-operators in each area. this isn't asking for much: all we are saying is that we have to assert ourselves to get what is rightfully ours.
