TimesView It is imperative that operators get their act clear this time. A lot of work has been done but there are pockets of turbulence. Viewers should not have to suffer because of the industry's internal problems. ‘Switching off channels for more than 24 hours is unacceptable’ KOLKATA: Several hundred homes have lived without any cable television at all in a corner of 21st-century Kolkata, representing an extreme-case scenario of the turbulence that has hit the industry, now struggling to switch over to à la carte mode.Deprived of their favourite dose of entertainment content, these consumers — in the Picnic Garden-Kasba belt — have been displaying classic “cold turkey” symptoms of irritability and restlessness after dusk. Here, about 6,000 households have faced some form of cable blackout, ranging from two days to a week or more since channels went off their TVs in mid-February or early March.The absence of TV has meant an information blackout of sorts. Biswajit Samaddar, who lives close to the Bondel Gate flyover and has been without cable TV for a week, says the lack of access to even news channels is frustrating, given that elections are round the corner. But it is the absence of Bengali channels that is proving difficult to manage at home. His mother and wife appear depressed and edgy, he said. “Everyone appears high-strung. Domestic quarrels have increased,” said Samaddar, who is contemplating shifting to a direct-to-home (DTH) operator.In certain instances, it has been reminiscent of the late 70s and 80s, but not in a rose-tinted nostalgia kind of way. Few households had TVs then, and people used to throng to their places whenever a cricket match or a good movie was on. “Now, my daughters have been going to a friend’s house to watch TV. It’s embarrassing,” said Kamaljit Kaur. She had paid Rs 550 for HD English and Hindi channels, which they are yet to view in over three weeks. “I have been to the local cable operator’s (LCO) office four times but the situation hasn’t changed,” said Kamaljit, who is also thinking about moving to DTH.Officials of Futurenet Cyber Dot Cable TV, the LCO that has caused such disruption in people’s lives, appear unperturbed. Though their office is flooded with customers complaining about their cable connections, S Maity, who controls the operation, says there is no problem.“We have a system of office collection that requires customers to get everything done at our office. The 10% revenue pie for LCOs in the new tariff regime is too little for us to provide door-to-door service. Customers have to come to our office to fill up forms, choose channels, submit it and make payments. If a set top box isn’t working, they have to come here and change it. Around 85% of customers have switched over to the new regime. The rest are happening,” said Maity, who controls connections provided by multiple MSOs.Alpana Chattoraj, who lives in a neighbourhood behind Kasba police station, alleges there has been “absolutely no effort to address the situation” by the LCO, even though she has been to the office. Chattoraj has not been able to tune in to a single channel in spite of having paid the subscription at the beginning of March. “I usually spend the evenings surfing channels and watching programmes. Since the blackout, the evenings have turned very dreary,” she said. Chattoraj has not been able to view even the free-to-air channels. “Access denied, please contact your supplier”, the “blue screen of doom” greets her whenever she switches on her TV.Even though this pocket represents a worst-case scenario, problems have cropped up on and off during the transition to the new cable tariff regime that began in end-January and gained momentum by the first week of February. Other cable operators said they, too, were struggling to come to terms with lower revenues but could not leave customers in the lurch and stop the services that they had been offering for twoand-a-half decades. “Regulator Trai had made it clear that LCOs have to hand-hold consumers through the transition without giving any pain,” said Apurba Bhattacharyya of Cable Operators’ Sangram Committee. “It has repeatedly said that channels cannot be switched off, and has extended the deadline multiple times. It has sometimes taken a few hours or a day due to traffic jams in the MSO server. But anything beyond 24 hours is unacceptable, certainly not now,” he added.

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