Becil chairman and managing director George Kuruvilla’s advice to cable operators of India is simple: embrace new technologies (like OTT services) with the changing times and adapt businesses accordingly.

Delivering a Special Address at the SatCab Symposium 2023 in New Delhi, Kuruvilla said the cable TV industry has “seen many changes” from the start when there were many challenges. But the fraternity has seen it all and done well too, including, first, getting the set-top boxes in the country and, later, upgrading to digital boxes.

“After all, we also are adopting the same technologies,” Kuruvilla told a houseful of audience, pointing out that Broadcast Engineering Consultant India Ltd (Becil) too is adapting to the changing times.

He highlighted how many of the cable operators present in the audience at the recently-held SatCab Symposium 2023 have witnessed the changing times when digitisation started and culminated after several phases, pushed and nudged by the government.

Dwelling on the new competition for cable operators, Kuruvilla said, “As we all know the competition from OTT platforms has come with big problems for the cable TV industry as they get good content on the platforms in a very short period of time.”

In the same vein, the seasoned technocrat also added that “we all get to adapt” to new technologies and sooner it’s done by the cable TV industry, the better for the sector and the society, in general.

Kuruvilla’s exhortations definitely resonated as the audience at this year’s SatCab Symposium, organized by the Aavishkar Media Group, was primarily made up of distributors of content, including senior representatives from MSO companies and independent LCOs.

This year’s conference, aptly themed ‘Is the Future of Indian Broadcasting Sector at Stake Now?’, saw a jam-packed hall of delegates and speakers listen and discuss the various issues impacting India’s media and entertainment (M&E) sector, which currently is going through recessionary pangs owing to several reasons.

Touching on the role and evolution of Becil, a company under the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Kuruvilla said the organisation has been involved in many broadcast industry-related initiatives, including setting up HD studios for the President’s House, Rajya Sabha TV and Lok Sabha TV channels, and instrumental in planning private FM broadcast networks in 86 cities that have been built on the common transmission infrastructure of pubcaster Prasar Bharati.

“Now we are also the auditors for the (regulator) TRAI approved auditors for the cable TV and DTH headends,” he said.

However, what he stressed on was that even for an organisation like Becil, it was necessary to adapt to and adopt newer technologies and trends by diversifying.

“Over the last few years after I took over as CMD, we have diversified into several areas…because these are the future technologies that will help many sectors,” Kuruvilla said, adding that one such initiative was the smart classrooms that the entire country was now adopting.

According to him, tech is helping services “getting integrated together” to make their availability easy through a single box.

“You can use the same box to deliver various kinds of the required deliverables to various clients as required,” he explained, adding that combination can also include entertainment services.