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Cable act amendment
unlikely to increase DD visibility
The
enactment of law for ensuring telecast of Doordarshan channels
will be a futile effort if the quality is not improved.
There
has been no instance of any cable operator receiving a notice
from a district magistrate for contravention of any law intended
to avoid undesirable programmes, according to a study conducted
in the past two months.
Only
ten per cent of cable TV operators in the Hindi belt have
upgraded or replaced equipment including cables in the last
couple of years despite the provision to that effect in the
cable television networks (regulation) act 1995.
The study
revealed that most cable operators were reluctant to include
three Doordarshan channels, including DD1 and DD2, in their
bouquet of channels in view of the poor technical quality
of signals of the channels.
The field
study was conducted by the centre for media studies (cms)
in the Hindi belt between June and July in 12 different clusters
spread across six Hindi speaking states and covered 140 cable
TV operators.
CMS director
P. N. Vasanti said the enactment of law for ensuring telecast
of Doordarshan channels will be a futile effort if the quality
is not improved. She also said the resistance would be even
more if the present trend of auctioning out time slots of
Doordarshan channels continues.
The survey
showed that not all cable operators were beaming more than
two Doordarshan channels. In fact only one channel of Doordarshan
at best is taken seriously. The quality of other doordarshan
channels, even if given, is relatively poor. Prasar bharati
had appointed an outside agency to monitor cable TV operations,
but the real need was for a Doordarshan official to go around
and meet cable TV operators.
Despite
recent efforts by channels including Doordarshan that subscribers
should ask cable operators for specific channels, the ‘demand
building’ is yet to be felt by operators (perhaps because
most of the time their telephone is out of reach for subscribers).
The satellite TV channels not offered to subscribers are mostly
the ones where the channel operators have not approached the
cable TV operators.
Zee TV,
Sony TV, Discovery and STAR Plus, in that order, is what by
and large cable TV operators of Hindi belt consider as more
reliable channels technically and viewership point of view.
In fact, these are the very channels which are ‘sought
after’ or favoured by subscribers locally. To cable TV
operators, Sony TV and Zee TV are considered as ‘mast’
(entertaining) channels. Jain TV is mentioned by operators
as one of the channels they may drop if they have to accommodate
a new one.
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