Kerala HC adjourned hearing of AIDCF's appeal against TRAI to Feb 18
AIDCF had moved Kerala High Court on January 8 and filed a petition against TRAI’s NTO 2.0
The Kerala High Court has passed an interim order directing the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) not to take precipitative steps that are detrimental to the interest of the All India Digital Cable Federation (AIDCF). The HC has adjourned the hearing to February 18.
AIDCF has moved to Kerala High Court on 8 January and filed a petition against TRAI’s NTO 2.0. As reported by the media, the AIDCF had stated that the placement, marketing and other agreements between broadcasters and distribution platform operators (DPOs) are not within TRAI's purview.
TRAI had mandated that channel of a language in a genre will be kept together while placing channels on EPG. Such EPG layout is to be mandatorily reported to the TRAI and no change in this can be done without prior approval of the authority. In order to address the concern of huge carriage fee, the authority had mandated that MSOs, HITS operators, IPTV service providers will not have target market bigger than State or Union Territory as the case may be.
In addition, a cap of Rs 4 lakh per month has been prescribed on carriage fee payable by a broadcaster to a DPO in a month for carrying a channel in the country. The cap for HD channels is Rs 8 lakh per month. The target market and capping of carriage fee were done to prevent exploitation of regional channels who have a specific target market.
TRAI had prescribed that the ‘discontinuation threshold’ for a channel will be the number arrived at by multiplying the average active subscriber base of the concerned distributor in its declared target market with the ‘discontinuation multiplier’ for the language of that channel. The ‘discontinuation multiplier’ for a language shall be 5% of the total percentage of the population speaking that language in the declared target market of the concerned distributor as per the latest Census data.
On 9 January 2020, the High Court adjourned the matter to 4 February 2020 and had asked TRAI to file a counter-affidavit against the petition which was submitted by TRAI’s advocate Jaishankar V.Nair, CGC on 1 February.
The Indian Broadcasting Federation or the IBF had also challenged TRAI's NTO 2.0 in the Delhi High Court and the matter has been adjourned to February 14, 2020.
TRAI had asked broadcasters to appraise the regulator of details of interconnection agreements with DPOs, which includes commercial details, marketing, placement, agreements on ad slots and an extended credit facility, etc. AIDCF had moved court against this move.
