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Rationalise excise duty, Vat on TV, STBs: Planning Commission
NEW DELHI: Acknowledging that the major hurdle in digitization presently is the absence of digital receiver sets and the fact that about 45 per cent TV sets are Black and White, a sub-group of the Planning Commission has recommended rationalization of the total taxation level to 12 per cent.
The sub-group on 'Going Digital' set up by the Planning Commission and headed by Rajeeva Ratna Shah, member secretary in the Planning Commission and a former CEO of Prasar Bharati, said this will mean the excise duty on digital TV set, set top boxes (STBs) and its inputs be rationalized to 8 per cent and there should be a state VAT of 4 per cent. This will give impetus to the indigenous STB industry, which would generate economic activity and employment in the country. .
How to Get Over-the-Air HDTV
I've been catching up on my magazine reads—yes, I still read magazines—and came across this recent Newsweek piece on the renewed sales boom and interest in old school TV antennas. Why? Because unbeknownst to many people, you can pick up HD broadcasts from your local network-affiliated stations with a simple set of rabbit ears, or the slightly newer-shapes such as the Terk HDTVi that I've been testing out for the past couple of months. In other words, HDTV broadcasts of shows such as 24, Heroes, or Today, not to mention basketball and other sports games, are completely free to you provided you have an ATSC tuner built-in to your HDTV (which pretty much all new HDTVs have). In some communities, you really need the over-the-air option: St. Louis's Charter Communications cable service didn't offer the Super Bowl in HD, for example, so only viewers with antennas were able to get the local feed.
Evaluating Alternative DTV Distribution
In the January RF Technology column, I looked at three USB tuners that offer an inexpensive way to monitor ATSC signals. While the software of two of the three displayed EPG data, specialized software was needed to display PSIP and stream information. I described Rob He-witt's TSReader software in August 2005. Since then, Rob has added new features and now offers TSReader Pro. At a cost of $399 versus $99, it isn't cheap, but it provides features approaching those of analyzers costing several times that much. TSReader now supports a wide range of hardware and can view digital cable PSIP data when used with the AutumnWave tuners. If you want to decode EIA-608 and EIA-708 closed-captioning data in TSReader, you'll need the Pro version. All closed-caption fields are displayed. More expensive ATSC stream analyzers can provide detailed reports of PSIP table problems.
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