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Andrew Bonwick
Vice President of Product Development at Relm Insurance
Madhav Sheth
CEO of Ai+ Smartphone
Varun Kashyap & Sridevi Reddy
Co-Founders, Zithara.ai
Transforming Indian Offline Retail and Customer Engagement Using AI
One of the best things that the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) has been working on this year is the Set-Top Box Interoperability. Now the concept and the idea has been in the DTH industry since the last few months, but apparently now that the idea is being vetted by the DTH operators, who are going to be the one implementing the idea, it has not seen the best of the comments. Trai floated the consultation paper on the Set-Top Box interoperability so that it could gain views of the industry stakeholders like the DTH operators, the cable TV operators and the other experts. However, it has not gone as planned as the DTH operators have mostly shared a negative point of view about the technology and pointed out the various hurdles that they would face if the interoperability is to be rolled out. Most of the concerns are related to the security of data and other related features of the interoperable Set-Top Box.
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Tata Sky Shares Concerns of Security
Firstly, looking at the Tata Sky’s response to the Trai consultation paper on this matter, the DTH operator has shared that the new interoperable STB should be able to retain the best features of the Set-Top Box which are currently available in the market while offering the interoperability feature. Not only this, but security is also one of the major concerns related to this technology. Currently, the Set-Top Box being offered to the subscribers comes with HDCP, water-marking and other solutions which ensure security. However, this is not possible with the technical solution proposed by the Trai. Also, there is no surety as to how much guarantee the third-party manufacturers will be able to provide in regard to security.
Another point that came up in the comments was more technical and related to transmission. The DTH operators remarked that the compression standards being used by the DTH operators are different and are always changing. As such, it becomes difficult to have a single Set-Top Box for all. There are different compression standards like MPEG2, MPEG4, HEVC and more. Apart from this, there are different processors, memory, speed configurations, encryption and transmission standards as well which come in the way of interoperability.
