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CHENNAI, March 28

THE Star group has decided to switch off transmission of its bouquet of channels from the SCV platform in Chennai, starting Friday night, following differences between the two sides over declarations and payment.

Mr Sameer Nair, COO, Star Indian Pvt Ltd, told press persons in Chennai today that the move was necessitated, as efforts to end the three-month-old deadlock, through negotiations with the multi-service operator (MSO), failed.

According to Mr Nair, differences cropped up between the two sides when the Star group decided to reduce the price of its bouquet of channels to Rs 35 from Rs 45, and asked for an increase in declarations (of the number of cable connections), "which apparently is not acceptable" to the MSO.

He claimed that SCV owed Star dues amounting to about Rs 4 crore for the three-month period, as the group decided not to accept payments made according to the "under-declared" figure. "While subscriptions have been collected for these months from consumers, we have not got out dues. The benefit of the price drop has not been passed on to consumers," said Mr Nair.

However, SCV's Mr Dayanithi Maran, told Business Line that SCV had paid Star, but the cheques were not encashed. He refuted the suggestion that there was any under-declaration and that Star had arbitrarily hiked the number of connections that the operator had to pay for while reducing the subscription fee per connection.

The move means that more than 60 per cent of the C&S homes in Chennai, which are being serviced by SCV, would not be able to watch the Star bouquet of channels. However, Star's channels would be distributed through Hathaway Cable, which has access to about 40 per cent of the C&S homes in the city.

Declining to quantify the loss ensuing out of the move to go off SCV, Mr Nair said the loss of viewership would be "considerable". Over the last three months, the group's channels have been in an on-and-off mode in places like Coimbatore and Madurai, he admitted.

Notwithstanding the move, Star is "toying with the idea" of a Tamil version of Channel V. It also plans to upgrade its programming for its Tamil channel, Vijay, in the next six to nine months. For this, it would double its spend on content, he said.

Star, which will launch its Hindi news channel on March 31, is also planning to introduce a cartoon channel for kids by this October.

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