A hearing that split the television industry down the middle
On June 10, 2026, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India convened an Open House Discussion in New Delhi that will help decide the regulatory fate of India's fastest-growing television format. The question on the table: should channels delivered through smart-TV apps — Free Ad-Supported Streaming Television (FAST) and the broader category TRAI calls Application-based Linear Television Distribution (ALTD) — be licensed and regulated the same way as cable and DTH? Broadcasters, DTH operators, cable federations, telecom firms, FAST platforms and internet industry bodies showed up with irreconcilable answers.
The hearing followed a formal consultation paper TRAI released on April 6, 2026, after India's Ministry of Information and Broadcasting referred the issue to the regulator in December 2025, asking it to design a framework that ensures "parity" with existing distribution platforms and strengthens content accountability.
At the OHD, the fault lines were sharp. Mahima Rathi of the All India Digital Cable Federation argued that "only licensed channels should be allowed to be transmitted or streamed within the territory of India through ALTD platforms." Yatin Gupta of GTPL Hathway pointed to a stark price gap: a channel bouquet costing roughly ₹60 a month on cable is available for around ₹14 per device a month on some FAST services. On the other side, Manish Sinha of FAST operator RunnTV warned that mandatory licensing would cause FAST channel availability to "decline significantly," while Ravi Gandhi of Jio Infocomm argued that internet aggregators don't perform the "carriage" function cable and DTH operators do, since consumers arrange their own broadband separately.
The case for parity, stated fairly
Broadcasters and DTH operators are not wrong that a real asymmetry exists. Licensed cable and DTH operators carry the compliance weight of TRAI tariff orders, quality-of-service benchmarks, MIB uplinking/downlinking permissions, and advertising and programme codes. FAST apps often carry the same channels, sometimes the same live feeds, with none of that overhead — and, as GTPL's pricing example shows, can undercut the very operators paying for the license to carry that content. If a pay-TV channel available only via subscription on DTH is being distributed free through an unregulated app, that is a legitimate content-accountability and fair-competition concern, not a manufactured one. Consumer-protection questions TRAI is also examining — grievance redressal, audience measurement transparency for a channel category with no independent ratings mechanism — deserve real answers, not a shrug.
Where the parity argument overreaches
But the fix broadcasters and cable operators are asking for goes well beyond fixing that asymmetry. DTH and cable licensing exists to govern last-mile infrastructure: net-worth thresholds, rollout obligations, spectrum-adjacent authorisation, physical carriage of signal into homes. A FAST app run by a startup with a media server and a licensing deal for its own channel bouquet is not performing any of that function. Importing the full DTH-style eligibility and registration apparatus onto ALTD would raise fixed compliance costs that only the largest, already-dominant players — including JioStar, one of the loudest voices against heavier regulation — can absorb. That would shrink exactly the pool of independent regional and niche FAST operators that make the category worth regulating carefully in the first place.
Industry group IAMAI and JioStar have also leaned on the argument that Parliament "deliberately excluded" OTT services from the Telecommunications Act, 2023. That claim needs a caveat: PRS Legislative Research's analysis of the Act notes it does not explicitly exclude internet-based services from its broad definition of "telecommunication services" — leaving messaging OTTs an unresolved grey area rather than a clean statutory carve-out. More to the point, TRAI's mandate here flows from the Ministry's reference under the TRAI Act, 1997's broadcasting jurisdiction, not the 2023 telecom law — so the industry's favorite argument answers a question the regulator isn't actually asking. The stronger objection to full parity is the practical one: carriage regulation designed for wired infrastructure operators is the wrong tool for an app-layer content category.
A narrower fix exists
TRAI does not have to choose between the status quo and full DTH-style licensing. It could require ALTD platforms to carry only MIB-cleared channels and comply with programme and advertising codes — addressing the piracy and content-accountability problem directly — without importing net-worth thresholds, rollout obligations or tariff-order machinery built for a different kind of operator. That targets the actual harm broadcasters are flagging without taxing new entrants out of the market.
The stakes are not abstract. India's connected-TV base grew roughly 85% in 2025 to around 129 million users, a large share of it in smaller towns underserved by legacy pay-TV. TRAI is now expected to weigh the OHD submissions before sending final recommendations back to MIB. Getting the calibration right — regulating the content, not the carriage — will decide whether that growth continues or gets regulated into the ground before it matures.