Airtel aren’t the only ones looking to drain your wallet. With the introduction of set-top boxes, a.k.a the Conditional Access System (CAS), your friendly neighborhood cable TV provider is about to as well. On midnight Sep 1, pay channels disappeared from across Chennai — the only city in the country where this happened. CAS is being rolled out in Mumbai as well, but channel blackouts I understand haven’t yet occurred. Seeing that I watch about 4 hours of television a month, I have yet to be bothered enough to call my cable TV operator about that set-top box, but I understand a kid used to Cartoon Network might see things differently. Here are the monthly package rates I got, from memory:

There is also a base fee (Rs 98 here) which fetches you 31 free-to-air channels, including NDTV, Aaj Tak, MTV, the all-important FTV and BBC World. Add Rs 30 for the local
favorite, the Sun network, which I don’t watch, and it seems the average family that paid ~Rs 250 for their monthly cable bill will now have to shell out ~Rs 320. Not good, considering many families grumble already about how “too much time is being taken up by the idiot box.” I expect many cable operators will see reduced collections per month at these rates.

More interesting is the individual channel pricing. Mainstream channels like Sony Hindi Star Plus are at Rs 20 (Zee Hindi is overpriced at Rs 25 — unless it’s expecting its
cow-belt appeal to see it through), and others cost Rs 10-15 (exception: Animal Planet is a bargain at Rs 4). Yet already, the once-niche Discovery is priced at Rs 20, no doubt mindful of the fact that it has the blessings of many Indian educators and parents.

Now that the industry is forcing audiences to put a price on their viewing pleasure per-channel, I expect to niche channel prices to rise slightly, and mainstream channels to fall, as audiences discover that the time spent with mainstream channels is not enough to be worth the money they’re asking for. Besides, mainstream channels by definition have little differentiation: Zee Hindi, Sony Hindi and Star Plus are all pretty much indistinguishable (unless you’re a fan of of a particular soap and would die if you didn’t get to see what happened next), and in a budget crunch I expect one or two of them to be axed from a household’s purchase list.

Wishlist for the CAS: I don’t really need 31 free channels. Give me 10, and charge me Rs 49 as the base fee.