Dhirendra Tripathi Moneycontrol News
Regulations concerning OTT players like Hotstar and other similar applications that ride on mobile Internet, foreign direct investment and vertical integration, including cross sector shareholding, are some of the issues that are likely to dominate the TRAI's agenda for the broadcasting sector in the next financial year.
A meeting between the broadcasters and TRAI was held on December 19 where the above items were brought up and discussed.
"The meeting was held to identify what is the work that the industry wants TRAI to focus on and also for TRAI to get a sense of the necessary changes that need to be brought into regulations to create an enabling environment for the emerging scenario," an official who was part of the meeting told Moneycontrol.
The regulator had last month floated a consultation paper to seek comments from stakeholders on constructing a regulatory framework for OTT players. They are currently not bound by any such law even as they have gone about hurting the revenue streams of telecom service providers and broadcasters alike.
With poor mobile connectivity, users are increasingly relying on applications like Whatsapp, riding on Wi-Fi, for messaging and calling. This ends up eating to the revenues of telecom companies who rely on voice calling for a large part of their revenues.
Similarly, the youth as well as on-the-move people are using Hotstar and SonyLiv to catch their favourite TV shows and live sports. In the process, more than one industry is being shaken and revenue models being turned upside down.
FDI too remains a sticky issue with the broadcasters though they themselves are split on this as FDI limits in news is still not uniform and varies from medium-to-medium - different from TV news to newspaper to radio news.
The government permits up to 49 percent FDI in TV and radio news broadcasting but it has kept a cap of 26 percent on FDI in newspapers. There is no cap on FDI in non-news segments. Also, no FDI limit is imposed on carriage and distribution services like direct-to-home, cable and mobile.
Vertical integration refers to a TV channel owning stake in a distribution platform like DTH or cable or vice versa. The regulator had in August 2014 issues recommendations on vertical integration and cross holdings, setting limits on cross ownership in case a company owned both a TV channel and a newspaper in the same market. The ministry of information and broadcasting, responsible for framing the recommendations into a law, never took a decision on them.
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