When we have mechanism like parental locks, there is no reason why these films should not be distributed digitally.

Challenges. Key challenges for the industry, in the near future will be to seek a moderation in the multiple taxation regime including reduction of license fee and abolition of entertainment tax, faster roll out of CAS to the next layer of towns, coping with a high subscriber acquisition cost, building content capacity under a dearth of availability of fresh transponder space, dealing with emerging category competition from digital cable and IPTV etc.

Opportunities. India's 130 million television households, define the potential depth for the DTH category acts as a low hanging fruit for adoption. Enrichment of value added services basket with gaming and a host of active services, some going pay, will continue to be opportunity areas for revenue enhancement. An eventful sporting calendar with the ensuing Commonwealth Games and a series of cricket events will act as a catalyst for this category too. The recent stabilization and a revived hope for bouncing back of the economy in the second half of this year will facilitate faster adoption of the category. Emergence and growth of traffic at the organized retail chains will also add more visibility leading to better acceptance of the product.

Threats. DTH is currently a five player market. Price cuts and reduced margins, spurred by severe competition, can pose a threat to revenue enhancement. Improved quality of services by digital cable is a potential threat. Churn management and retention costs can negatively impact bottom-lines unless constant attention and strategy is deployed to manage and control the subscribers' base.

Multiple taxation policy in the broadcasting industry should be done away with. Currently, there is service tax, entertainment tax, value added tax, fringe benefit tax and more. In DTH, the effective tax rate is 45 percent. Print has no service tax component and gets other waivers. The government should encourage the growth of the industry that is suffocating from multiple taxation policy.

The content code should be notified. The film industry has been producing films with adults only certification for decades but there is no digital outlet for these films now. When we have mechanism like parental locks, there is no reason why these films should not be distributed digitally. There are provisions for this in the content code and it has been awaiting notification for a long time now.

Pay channel pricing has been frozen for five years now. It was frozen when the conditional access system was being implemented and at that time the TRAI said, it was a temporary arrangement. For five years now, it has remained a temporary arrangement.

In the analog cable domain, which reaches most of India, there is capacity only for 60 channels. There are already 400 channels with down-linking licenses. Now the government should only give permission for downlinking on digital platforms such as DTH, IPTV and digital cable. This will give a greater impetus to digitization.