Community Extra: Calendar

THE television screen turns into a static charge of salt and pepper hiss. If you have the patience to linger to find out why, without instantly switching to another channel, you will eventually learn that this is what is in store for you if you are living in one of the four metros; if you are served by cable, not DTH (direct to home); and if you do not put in place that digital set-top box by the end of October. It is a portentous public interest advertisement which serves notice on an analogue media era and prepares to usher in the digital-only realm of television viewing.

It is part of building the momentum, in the wake of the Cable Television Networks (Regulation) Amendment Act of 2011, towards a total changeover to digital distribution via cable in four stages: the four metros by October 31 this year; cities with a population of over a million by March 31, 2013; all other urban centres by the end of September 2014; and the rest of the country by the end of the calendar year 2014. The conversion is both a legal and a technological imperative. Digitise or perish is the writing on the wall. You are damned if you do not.

It is not as self-evident, though, that you’re not damned if you do. The democratic logic of digitisation is better, cheaper, more equitable access and choice for the consumer. The analogue hierarchy of a clutch of channels on prime band that register effulgent clarity in picture and sound followed by a longish tail of poor and poorer cousins on the less and lesser bands with inferior, even indifferent, visual and audio quality is, in the digital mode, replaced by a qualitative constant across the board where the look and feel of each channel directly reflect the production input and values of its content and there is no distribution diffusion. That would be the one obvious change and would itself certainly make the difference between night and day for those yet stuck with analogue signals.

But the investments required for the digital rollout and spread, the high-end consumerist appetites and values they privilege, and the sheer scale of the operation put the business of digital cable networking out of the league and out of the reach of the small- or medium-scale entrepreneur. This new regime in the media sector, as much as the policy and the law that propel it, is made to order for digital capitalism.

The fat cats of the business have already begun to parse the law to suit their rapacity, but are couching it in terms of the best interests of the consumer. The path to digitisation is paved with their good intentions. A recent conclave on Media and Entertainment Business organised by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) in Chennai revealed, to mix metaphors, their itchy palms in velvet gloves. In a panel discussion on opportunities in the digitised era, the participants, who were among the major stakeholders from the content and distribution side of the industry, seemed in no doubt that the raison d’etre of digitisation was consolidation and vertical integration of their businesses. There was a queer money-minded nostalgia for the business advantages of the analogue market being left behind,Shop for high quality wholesale parking sensor system products on DHgate and get worldwide delivery. even as they scrambled to take over the digital El Dorado of the future. They would, if they could, have the best of both worlds, analogue and digital.We have a wide selection of dry cabinet to choose from for your storage needs.

And so, while they are agreed that digitisation would enable upscaled quality, they are even more agreed that consumers must be prepared to pay more for it; and we naively thought digital meant lower costs. The revenue model in digital cable networks is, typically, subscription driven so that advertisements do not hog and clutter airtime. But there is a clear reluctance to part with advertisement revenues,Find the best iPhone headset for you at Best Buy. and the upshot may well be that even as we pay more we will continue to be subject to long stretches of commercials interrupting programmes (as the witticism goes, a programme on television is what happens between advertisements).

Then there is the question of carriage fees, which acquires critical importance in a situation where, more than ever before, how to get to be seen is the despair of every new television channel. Thanks to digitisation, the bandwidth required for one analogue transponder or channel is compressed to spin off five or six new ones, making the transponder the least—from the most—expensive component in the outlay for a new channel. But with so many channels (there are over 600 on air now and as many or more awaiting licences) jostling with one another for distribution, and with no norms or rules in place, the big multi service operators (MSOs), like their DTH counterparts,Offering lowest priced printed lanyard in Canada. have been charging exorbitant and whimsical carriage fees, skewing the field strongly in favour of the big media corporations which can cough up such amounts, with hefty additional premiums for prime placements. Those who cannot afford this are left out in the cold, and there are so many instances of new channels having to repeatedly delay their launch because of this acute distribution squeeze that the whole process seems ridiculously weighed against the small and medium players.Promotional custom keychain at ePromos Promotional Products.