Soon after issuing the quality of service norms for the DTH  TV industry, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) on Monday issued a directive aimed at streamlining the operations of the sector, making it mandatory for broadcasters to offer all their channels on a la carte basis to DTH operators.

TRAI said that broadcasters could also additionally offer bouquets, but they would not compel any DTH operator to include the entire bouquet in any package being offered to their subscribers. The directive is likely to work in favour of consumers as the operators will be able to offer popular channels without clubbing them with other channels in a bouquet.

In case a DTH operator includes various pay channels of a broadcaster’s bouquet in different DTH packages for its subscribers, the payment for the bouquet will be made by the operator to the broadcaster based on the highest subscriber base for any pay channel from that bouquet, it said.

TRAI said the a la carte rates of pay channels and the rates of the bouquets would be so related that the sum of the rates of pay channels in a bouquet does not exceed 1.5 times the bouquet rate, and no a la carte rate of a pay channel in a bouquet will be more than three times the average pay channel rate of that bouquet.

The directives, in the form of the Telecommunication Interconnection (Fourth Amendment) Regulation 2007, will come into effect from December 1.