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Eye-straining TV channels

Piracy plagues cable TV as viewers deprived of popular pay channels

City Correspondent
A few thousand Dhaka residents may turn on their television sets only to confront flickering and see badly rendered images and hazy shadows.
The appearance of these eye-watering television channels is all part of a section of cable oper-ators' unscrupulous marketing efforts gone awry.
To fulfil the needs of their customers, these cable operators give them a glimpse of many of the pay channels through piracy and illegal
However, this has not stopped the cable operators from resorting to piracy and illegally broadcasting a number of pay channels to their viewers.
Although the quality of these channels is pretty mediocre with badly rendered and hazy images, the subscribers are made to pay the full government-set fees for them.
In July last year the information ministry set the fees for cable TV subscription at Tk 300 per month for operators providing 60 channels
from the distributors. We have to pay around Tk 280 to Tk 290 to distributors against each connection," he said.
Although cable television companies spend huge amount of money to install new, high-tech systems around the city, the service remains poor.
Subscribers say they cannot reach cable companies in case of any complaints about service, broadcasting of unnecessary and offensive channels.
As the cable television industry remains
monopolistic and anticompetitive, subscribers often raise questions about the indiscriminate rates and poor consumer service.
The authorities also have their own complaints to add to the list.
Although the cable operators are collecting unreasonably high charges from viewers, they are allegedly not paying the right amount of taxes to the government, National Board of Revenue (NBR) sources said.
While the amount of VAT and supplementary duty collected from the cable operators have been gradually increasing, the government is still being deprived of a gigantic proportion of taxes, the sources added.
"Dodging taxes is possible because the government does not have a mechanism to estimate the exact number of connections," said a pay channel distributor.
"Although Cable Operators' Association of Bangladesh has an estimation on the number of connections, it is quite vague. Therefore, the authorities have no way to know whether if they are receiving the right amount of taxes," he said.