Friday 28 March 2014

DTH operators plans to challenge I & B Ministry’s notice on arrears

As the MIB on 26th March had issued a notice to all direct-to-home (DTH) operators to submit license fee dues amounting to Rs 2,066 crore, operators are now planning to challenge the notice on the ground that the matter is subjudice and is pending in the Supreme Court.  
However, the DTH Operators Association of India is yet to decide whether the challenge will be in the form of a reply to the Ministry or an application in Court.

According to the notice sent earlier this week, the six private operators have been asked to pay the amount within fifteen days. However, most of the operators said they had cleared the dues of licence fee.
The operators say the licence fee as demanded under the rules is on gross revenue (GR) whereas they have been asked to pay the fee on the basis of adjusted gross revenue (AGR). The operators have said the fee should be only on subscription revenue and not on allied earnings such as dividend and interest income.
According to figures furnished in the reply to the Parliament, Tata Sky paid licence fee of Rs 79.3 crore in 2011-12 as against Airtel Digital’s Rs 61.87 crore and Dish TV’s Rs 30 crore. Sun Direct paid Rs 36 crore, Reliance Big TV paid Rs 9.5 crore, and Videocon d2h paid Rs 5 crore.
DTH services are governed by the DTH guidelines and terms and conditions issued by the I&B Ministry on 15 March 2001 and amended from time to time.    
The six privates DTH players in the country cover around 3.5 crore TV homes.  Free dish currently has 59 slots including 22 of its own and which it hopes to increase to 97 by the end of this year and ultimately to 250 slots over the next two years. It does not change any subscription as there are no pay TV channels on board.

Source: http://cablequest.org/news/dth-news/item/4497-dth-operators-plans-to-challenge-i-b-ministry%E2%80%99s-notice-on-arrears.html
Source: http://cablequest.org/news/dth-news/item/4497-dth-operators-plans-to-challenge-i-b-ministry%E2%80%99s-notice-on-arrears.html

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