Trai Reduces Channel Price Cap to Rs 12 From Rs 19 But Will it Help the Consumers

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) and its agenda in the DTH industry has been consumer transparency and fair pricing. All the steps that Trai has taken in the last few years have been to accomplish this only. Of course, the last major step in this was the introduction of the Trai tariff regime, or the National Tariff Order (NTO). But, now we are getting to see a second major rollout from Trai, which is NTO 2.0. A second take on the tariff order which changes some of the previous rules. Now one of the major reasons why Trai had to rollout this second tariff order and changes is because it wanted to target the misuse of the pricing freedom that it had given to the broadcasters. Also, the regulator felt that somewhere the essence of the Trai tariff regime was being lost because of more channel pack selections by the subscribers and less focus on a-la-carte. To bring this back, Trai has introduced a new set of measures in the industry which are to go live on March 1 and will supposedly bring a fair playing field for the DTH companies and offer a better choice to the subscribers as well.

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The Fall of Pricing Cap to Rs 12 Per Month

One of the significant ways in which Trai is going to try to weed out the excessive discounting on the channel packs is by reducing the pricing cap for the inclusion in channel bouquets. This basically means that the channels which can be packaged into a bouquet should not be priced more than Rs 12 per month. Whereas, before the new rules, the limit for the channel pricing for them to be packaged under a bouquet was Rs 19 per month. This means that the broadcasters will have to bring down the prices of a lot of channels if they want to keep them in channel bouquets.