Indian broadcasting industry faces serious roadblocks to digitizing though KPMG survey estimates this to increase from 33% in 2010 to 64% by 2015. Nowadays, it is common to blame everything on corruption & politics...so it is not surprisingly true even here...the key impediments/roadblocks to quickly and profitably roll out digitisation:
1. Demand side effects: Subscriber costs will move up limiting slower uptake of services through Set-top-boxes/DTH. Subscribers have become too happy in paying Rs 200-250 for a boquet of popular channels through analog cables running. Probably the analog cable operators and franchisees can afford to provide these at such low cost due to underreporting of subscriber base by their franchisees :-)
2. Supply side: Increasing content development/delivery/marketing cost coupled with decreasing revenues in media (80% revenue comes from advertising in this industry but this would get strained probably due to other channels of communication) strains broadcasters margins & cashflows. This will make broadcasters wary of investing in digitization unless they are profitable. A sort of chicken-egg scenario....
3. Extraneous factors: Cables are run by politicians in some states...In others they are controlled by local goons who control which channel can be transmitted...the other interesting thing is politicians fear that digitization will bring accountability, and transparency removing any discretionary powers of state to control information reaching mass....so we will see lot of irrelevant non-issues being posed as reasons such as employment opportunities denied, poverty, last mile-connectivity, rural population affordability, minority issues, etc.
MIB has published a deadline to phases out analog transmission by 31st Dec 2013 and later created a phased roll out for cities and it seems it is delayed further... we can possible see a festering can of worms bred by unholy nexus here....
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