Sorting through old files recently we came across two documents that reflect how far India’s subscription TV market has come in the past 15 years and how the industry leadership saw this coming. Firstly a document tagged ‘Project Mars’ from 1995/1996. The idea was to create a consortium founded by a leading Indian newspaper publisher, a UK media group, a Hong Kong broadcaster and an Australian soap opera programming specialist. A distant possibility was a terrestrial license to compete with state broadcaster Doordarshan. The second document was a set of papers drawn from a November 1996 media conference in New York City designed to create excitement about investment prospects for pay-TV in India. Both sets of papers had some interesting stats as base data: In 1995/1996 there were 166 million households in India with 50m TVHHS. Cable households accounted for just 15m connections. There were no DTH households. Just three percent of TV households had colour TV. There were 60,000-90,000 cable operators. In February 1996, the Government of India was mandated by the Supreme Court to create regulator the Telecoms Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) with an eye to promote a cellular market, which at that time comprised more than 20 markets (circles or cities) for which only a fraction had received ‘qualified’ bids. The 1995 Cable Law, superseding the India Telegraph Act of 1885, had just been passed. There were about 30 satellite channels on air, dominated by state broadcaster Doordarshan (DD) with a dozen channels, including three national services. Some long-term players were already in the market with DD: AsiaNet, AajTak, In-cableNet, Siticable (now renamed WWIL), Sony, Zee TV, Star, Sun TV, CNN, Discovery, Viacom-MTV . . . And some now veteran Indian TV figures were already on the scene: Subhash Chandra (of course), Kalanithi Maran, Raghav Bahl, Ronnie Screwvala, Roop Sharma, Amit Khanna, Prannoy Roy, Digivijay Singh, G. Krishnan, Anshuman Misra, Harish Thawani, Ashok Mansukhani . . . Most telling, was a broad consensus that DTH would be the coming thing and ‘digital’ would be the way ahead. The Internet, Broadband, IPTV and Mobile TV were unmentioned. There would be more than 100 channels in the market by 2000, according to one forecast. And Doordarshan was ahead of the game: “DTH is likely to be the largest source of revenue for electronic media in the decades to come . . .” Now we fast-forward (not yet via our network-based PVR) to November 2009. Recent data released by TRAI show 215 million households and 132 million TV households. Cable TV, DTH and broadband households of all kinds are touching the 100 million mark. Now with five private DTH operators and almost 16 million subscribers, DTH is growing at 15 percent per quarter with digital cable households moving towards five million connections. According to the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting the maximum number of channels carried by an MSO is more than 260. Total licensed channel availability stands at around 450 (including free channels). A large number of channels (100+) were granted licenses to launch over the past 12 months and over 150 channels are in the queue waiting for the government nod. There are 427.29 million wireless phone subscribers, the jewel in the TRAI crown. Apart from these, the total Internet subscribers as of June end stood at 14.05 million with broadband accounting for 6.62 million subscribers plus 127 million wireless data subscribers. All of the above demonstrate that while there are still areas of friction between regulators and industry – rate caps at Rs.5 per channel per month, ‘must supply’ provisions for content, FDI caps at 49 percent for pay-TV investment (as compared to 74 percent for telecoms) and an uneven tax regime – India’s pay-TV and telecoms markets have performed unimaginably well in the years since 1995/1996. And the best may be yet to come. In late September, when a CASBAA delegation drawn from its Board of Directors and senior advisory group, the CASBAA Council of Governors, met the Minister for Information & Broadcasting, the Chairman of TRAI, the Secretary for Telecommunications and the Wireless Advisor to the Government of India, the dynamics were more than positive. During the two days of meetings, the prospects for cable TV digitization, market consolidation, down-linked channel licensing, changes in content regulation, taxation, revenue retention and the licensing of Head-end-in-the-Sky (HITS) services were addressed. Most encouragingly, the MIB and TRAI discussions re-emphasized the early licensing of Head-end-in-the-Sky (HITS) satellite operations for down-linking pay-TV services to cable operators and an acknowledgement that digitization of the national cable TV system was an urgent government priority. The ‘under-reporting’ of cable TV subscribers by cable operators was recognized as an issue. Another government priority would appear to be the need to streamline the process for licensing satellite channels accessing the India market with a concomitant requirement for greater transparency of that process. Officials also committed to additional transparency as the government considers how to proceed on the long-awaited Broadcasting Bill and the subsequent establishment of an independent Broadcasting Regulatory Authority of India (BRAI) and the enshrinement of an industry self-regulated Content Code. Just a hint of the tempo of things to come was suggestion by a senior official that an objective of 100 percent digitization of India’s 85 million cable homes could be achieved within two years. Let’s just imagine that a milestone of the deployment of 60 million digital set-tops can be achieved before Y/E 2015. That this should be on the table is, indeed, a long, long way from 1995. It’s a distant planet, but not so far from Mars.