Exclusive | MVP – The Master’s Voice Podcast: Paritosh Joshi to TRAI – ‘You’re doing a public disservice. It’s time you cut our losses.’

Press Play to listen to Paritosh Joshi on MVP – The Master’s Voice Podcast with Pavan R Chawla

This, the 57^th episode of the award-winning MVP – The Master’s Voice Podcast, features industry veteran Paritosh Joshi – Principal at Provocateur Advisory, and we disuss TRAI’s ‘regulation of the broadcast sector in general and its most recent consultaion paper on the travesty called NTO 2.0 in particular.

The TRAI report card, says Paritosh, has been a litany of failure right from the first mandate it received, till today. Across its 25 years so far, Paritosh says what TRAI has — unlike the OfComs and other bodies of the world — is authority without responsibility.

We discuss TRAI’s ‘regulation’ of the broadcast sector in general, and its most recent consultation paper seeking inputs and guidance on the travesty called  NTO 2.0. The straight-talking, richly experienced ‘Provocateur’ Paritosh, who has been helping empower industry bodies like ASCI and the Media Research Users Council MRUC, and has been President and Head of Sales and Distribution at India’s top network, the Star Network, brings to our discussion knowledge and insights from a rich and proven professional career.

At  this point in time, after a quarter century of its deleterious misadventure with broadcast regulation,   the industry too would likely want to repeat Paritosh’s words as a message to TRAI: ‘You are now doing a public disservice, and it is about time you cut our losses. Please don’t do any more disservice… Ab to jaan chhordo yaar! (at least now, spare us, please!)’. That, says Paritosh, is basically what nobody has been able to tell TRAI in as many words so far

We discuss TRAI’s performance as a broadcast regulator, and Paritosh responds to some of the questions in the consultation paper.  And shares several thoughts about TRAI’s ‘capability’ and multiple failures across 25 years of intrusive ineptitude as a regulator of the broadcast sector.

TRAI, Paritosh says, has failed the broadcast sector because it is a regulator that was designed for working on a commodity style of product, telecom, and not a highly differentiated style of product which is what Broadcasting is all about. And which is utterly alien to TRAI’s vocabulary. TRAI tried to force-fit the telecom regulatory style to the broadcast sector, and they failed it.

In fact, even the very first job TRAI was tasked with by a judicial body – that of implementing CAS in India, TRAI failed in, in spectacular fashion: CAS never happened.  It is instructive, Paritosh says,  that after more than two decades of being the accidental broadcast regulator, one has to look closely for the term ‘broadcast’ in the official TRAI presence and will find it only if one digs deep into their website.

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Paritosh recalls that  around 10-odd years ago, TRAI had asked for interoperability of set top boxes. But like everything they have ever asked for, that too never happened. Because, Paritosh believes, “…What (TRAI) asks for, at the time when they ask for it, is so preposterous, it can’t happen! So theirs has been a litany of failures! Enough already! How many Ds can a guy get in his CGPI solo that he’s not allowed to be in a class?”

At  this point in time, after a quarter century of its deleterious misadventure with broadcast regulation,   the industry too would likely want to repeat Paritosh’s words as a message to TRAI: You are now doing a public disservice, and it is about time you cut our losses. Please don’t do any more disservice… Ab to jaan chhordo yaar! (at least now, spare us, please!)

Paritosh hopes that at some point, wide heads would prevail (in TRAI) and it would come out and say, ‘Look, we’re not cut out for this. Somebody shoved it down our throats once upon a time. We tried manfully to do as much as we could with it. We will now acknowledge that all that we can do now, is find those people who can actually do it. Which is you guys (the broadcasters and other broadcast industry stakeholders). Let’s sit down together (and chalk a way ahead)’.

Paritosh says TRAI has forgotten the wise words of Pradeep Baijal, who, in the very early parts of the 25 years since TRAI came into being, was in the TRAI Chair, had observed to the effect that what we needed to protect the interests of the consumer (who is the most important and really matters) and in his words, no regulation of any intrusive sort would be needed once the interests of the consumer would be protected. And that that would happen once the last mile was competitive.

At the time when TRAI took charge, the last mile was monopolized by a single cable operator, who worked with maybe one or other MSOs. And the moment that monopoly was broken with the arrival of DTH, Mr Baijal said ‘all we need is a second DTH player in the market, and at that time, we will start practicing forbearance’. But TRAI, alas, has demonstrably sworn itself off forbearance.

And whatever the reasons for TRAI’s litany of failures and a report card stacked with straight Ds – incapability, disinterest or its obviously entitled and often partisan high-handedness despite floundering in its own data- and knowledge-dark  world – TRAI has never tried to address the big platform research hole in all its 25 years!

It has never commissioned a good, robust platform research, like a readership research under IRS or a viewership research under BARC. That, says Paritosh, should have been done  under its own aegis, with stakeholders and all the industry bodies  participating in and also co-funding it, so that the ground reality is clear to all.

What TRAI has, says Paritosh, is an extraordinary case: Authority without responsibility. And for a sector that is so crucial to not only the entire Media and broadcasting space, but also, eventually, to the economy, it must be allowed to flourish. After all, as Paritosh puts it, “For the longest time now, I have believed that when you look at the leading and lagging indicators of economic development in an economy, entertainment services and their consumption is a true indicator of what’s happening underneath.”

So, from tracing the history of TRAI’s succession of intrusive naivette of a dangerous, sector-choking kind, to responding to some of TRAI’s requests for inputs on the recent consultation paper on the NTO 2.0 (the implementation of which TRAI has extended to end September), Paritosh shares his views and recommendations, holding forth in his very own illuminative, insightful fashion.

And of course, as always, the man with the encyclopaedic anecdotal memory, makes this conversation on TRAI and its trying NTO 2.0, a deep-dive delight for the professional and the academic alike.

So do catch my conversation with Paritosh Joshi, who holds forth like not many others can.

Thank you for your time.