Last year when the Indian government forced people to watch television on cable through a conditional access system where you pay only for what you want to see, what was aimed as a win-win system ended up being less successful than what had been predicted. Some people bought set top boxes from their cable operators,  some switched to DTH services, some subscribed only to free-to-air channels that cost them only a basic hundred rupees and some packed up their idiot boxes for good.

Tata Sky is losing customer loyalty for using one of the worst techniques of making money, introducing new terms and conditions for revenue generation - something Reliance Communications is famous for and something I had never expected from the Tata group. When we started subscribing to Tata Sky’s best package at that time, little had we known this would remain the greatest package for a very short period of time.

Over the past one year they’ve introduced many additional packages through what is called an add-on package system. In the beginning they introduced channels like NDTV Imagine and NDTV Lifestyle, offered it for a month and gave users the option of paying a nominal fee to watch them after that trial period. We were not tempted to subscribe and even if were we wouldn’t have minded since these were new channels that weren’t originally part of our package but at the same time it is important to note that we Tata Sky users have to pay for channels like these that are broadcasted free of cost through cable television. They introduced Neo Sports and did something similar. Again accepted.

What separated DTH services from regular cable TV was the enticing package system and discounts for multiple TV viewing. Slowly they are breaking up channels or groups of them into add-on packages now reaching a point making matters unacceptable. What they’ve casually done over the last one month is notify users that all sports’ channels are no longer part of any base package as they now collectively constitute the Sport Gold Add-on package. No, this did not make IPL fans suffer but it sure does make the people who love Roland Garros suffer.

The customer support(don’t know how they call it personalized) refuse to talk clearly and are trained to let customers feel confused. But they do a really good job of convincing us that the option we chose may not be the best and it would have been wise to pack up our idiot boxes as well and let competition rise instead of a monopoly. That wasn’t so and many excited people even switched to LCD TVs like us making us feel even worse when we realized what they mean by DVD quality.

When you push in a DVD into your player and watch it on your 32″ display it doesn’t look as distorted as Tata Sky does. I don’t think I’m the only one complaining. And this is true of Dish TV as well. The TRAI does a good job of ensuring Airtel, Hutch and Reliance don’t take advantage of a very large and ignorant population and something like that needs to be done with TV viewing as well. We’re only paying more, not for better quality of service, but something that’s bound to get worse. I’d willingly upgrade and pay a hundred extra if there were a add-on package that is ad-free.

We really need to start some anti-trust lawsuits here in India, but the problem is that big money always wins instead of big mindshare. We’ve paid for an additional year now, and wont switch to any other service for the time being unless HD content is suddenly offered by someone. That’s only a false hope. Hell, 3G was supposed to be implemented by now. Let’s hope the iPhone gives 3G developments some momentum.