The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) finalized & issued recommendations on the “Issues related to Digital Terrestrial Broadcasting in India. TRAI chairman RS Sharma said this is a move that may lead a combination of multiple DTT transmitters at a location, which can provide a rich bouquet of SDTV, HDTV, UHTV, mobile TV channels, radio service and other value added services.
Today, in the digital era, consumers prefer to have access to number of TV channels on various devices such as mobile phone and other handheld devices. However, terrestrial viewers are deprived of such benefits due to non availability of digital terrestrial broadcasting services, he added.Terrestrial television broadcasting is the preferred method for providing free-to-air TV services to the people in most of the countries.
At present, Terrestrial TV broadcasting in India is under the exclusive domain of Doordarshan (Prasar Bharati), the Public Service Broadcaster and it is predominantly analog. While a large number of TV channels are available to the consumers through various delivery platforms such as DTH, Cable TV, IPTV, HITS etc, the existing terrestrial TV platform provides only a few channels which do not offer a value proposition to the viewers.