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Times News Network [ May 12, 2003 ]
CAS @ work: a first-person account
SUDIPTO DEY / AN ECONOMICTIMES.COM EXCLUSIVE
NEW DELHI: The Sukhija family in New Delhi's upscale New Friend's Colony is getting curious knocks on the door from neighbours. All of them want to gawk at the VCR-shaped blackish-grey 1-kg box sitting on their television set.
Meet the centrepiece of the Conditional Access System – aka CAS - that gets rolling in the four metros from July 14 onwards. This is the set-top box that promises to change everything for TV viewers, not to mention the TV signal distribution industry and TV networks.
The Sukhijas are one of the thirty-and-odd families in the posh South Delhi localities of Maharani Bagh and Friend's Colony who are getting a first hand-taste of CAS, courtesy a pilot run by the local cable guy, Home Cable.
For Ravi Sukhija, a garments exporter, it's only though the set-top box allows him to tune into ESPN, STAR Sports, Zee News and STAR News: the four channels that Home Cable's CEO Vikki Choudhary has chosen to test-run the system on.
 The box – an analog one, cheaper than the digital variety – can store information for up to 106 channels 
It wasn't difficult for Sukhija to program his set top box, which will cost, in the commercial version, Rs 3,000. Right now, of course, he isn't paying for letting Choudhary test the system. All Sukhija had to do was to plug in the cable from the cable-operator into the set-top box instead of the TV – and then connect the leads from the box into rhe TV set.
The box – an analog one, cheaper than the digital variety – can store information for up to 106 channels. It's activated by simply pressing a switch, which lets a smart chip fitted inside kick in. The next step is to choose the channels one wants and pay for them.
Of course, this was a prototype process, but what Sukhija had to do was to activate the service by making a phone call to Choudhary's office. On his part, Choudhary responded to the call by activating the menu of channels, and Sukhija had
to use his TV remote to pick the channels of his choice as they were displayed on his TV screen.
Payment? That was done through a voice-activated telephone system – the kind used by call centres. Subscribers will have the choice of either buying a pre-paid card and then having their payment for the channels or boutiques they pick deducted from it, or paying at the end of the month through a bill – just like mobile phone services. And that's it. After that, it's no different from watching TV now.
Cut to Choudhary's control room. Through a subscriber management system installe on his PC, the cable operator has individual access to the set-top boxes – and, by extension, to what's displayed on their TV screens – of each subscriber. The proprietary software enables Choudhary to address each subscriber personally: from blocking off channels that the subscriber does not want, and letting through unscrambled signals of those he does; from sending a subscription renewal alert to flashing a personal message or targeted ad, Choudhary can do it all.
An interesting feature of the subscriber management software, developed by Singapore-based R&D venture, SPL Innotech PTE, is that the chip can record viewing patterns, offering completely accurate trends.
The downside – how could there not be one? – is that each TV in a single household will need its own set-top box. But there's an antidote: Sukhija, for instance, now wants to subscribe to a sports channel only when India is playing cricket – and only for those days. That, to him, is what conditional access is all about.
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