Not Viable To Implement Portable Set-Top Boxes For Cable TV: Information Broadcast Ministry Contradicts TRAI

The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB) has stated that currently “the inter-operability of Set-up boxes (STBs) in the cable section is not viable”, the Television Post reports.

The MIB statement to the Parliamentary Standing Committee on IT contradicts the view of Telecom Regulatory Authority of India’s (TRAI) Chairman R S Sharma. The regulatory bodies chairman had earlier said that it hopes to bring inter-operable STBs by the end of the year.

With inter-operable STBs, customers need not change their STBs when they want to switch to a new service provider. Currently, the STBs are limited to each service provider as they use different technical parameters.

The MIB said that there are various technical and commercial issues from inter-operable STBs. The body emphasised the need to detail out requirements from a technical perspective since it would have a massive impact at every level of implementation and the entire ecosystem including original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and the distribution system.

Further, the implementation will become OEM over-specific, and the inter-operability will need considerable changes to implement various components in software and security. Also, the MIB notes that the fate of the STBs already existing in the field is unclear.

The ministry added that the operating system/middleware and the EPG bootloaders are chip vendor-specific. The OEMs will only allow software update by specific operators only after proper verification as the STBs are tightly integrated to avoid piracy.

The MIB said that the topic has been in the public domain many years but has not seen clear planning and approach to achieve the goal of inter-operable STBs. Technical inter-operability visioned in the current DTH guidelines has until now not proved useful as the Conditional access model costs the same as a new STB due to little volume.