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The Curious Case of Cable Pirates


TV Channels borrow, Cable channels steals!

Piracy of entertainment related software (movies & music) is blatant in both their physical (CD
& DVD’s) & digital (download peer to peer sharing) & remains for the most part unchecked. The
net effect of this is that pirated music & movies are freely available to any one who either has a
computer with an internet connection or is willing to pay Rs. 30/= for a CD or DVD.

May be this scenario does not sound terribly troublesome as you can argue legal music &
movies are too expensive for almost 95% population of Pakistan but using these arguments also
means ignoring impact of piracy in the layer content.

The impact of piracy on media cannot be ignored.

In 2004-05, license to cable operators were distributed like visiting cards, along with airing
satellite& terrestrial channel & permission to run in house channel to generate advertising
revenue. Cable operators needed content to air on their channels but were not willing to pay
huge sum of money for production, so they turned to Pakistan’s flourishing piracy trade &
picked up cheap music & movies. This would have been nipped in the bud but PEMRA acts like a
watch dog with no teeth.

Cable operator took this silence to mean consent and allowed themselves greater liberty by
airing Indian channels like Star Plus, Sony, Colors which do not have landing rights in Pakistan:
they started ad pasting (local ads over foreign ads).

Viewers were flocking to the in house & Indian channels because here was content that actually
wanted to watch. And as the viewership increased so did advertisers. This is now a billion
rupees industry.

Advertiser and even media planners are going so far as to suggest cable channels have higher
audience number compared to any popular satellite channel.

In a situation where cable operators were unwilling to stop airing non-copyrighted content &
PEMRA was not interested in putting an end to the violations, it was up to the advertisers to
take a stand on the matter.

Pakistan Advertisers Society (PAS) & few MNC & large local companies brought out a position
paper on cable advertising. In the paper PAS strongly suggested that its members repair from
advertising on illegal content in all forms but it results in a case of too little & too late. The
loop holes allow some form of advertising e.g. legal content, branded songs & Corporate
documentaries (termed as legal content).

Continuing to advertise on cable in one form or another also brings up the debate of whether
big advertiser are continuing to support piracy?

In my rough idea the situation stands thus:

Cable operators are freely airing illegal content & channel which have no landing rights in
Pakistan without fear of reprimand from PEMRA.

Now, they are acting like a mafia who have plenty of advertisers to finance their channels
& Satellite channels to get a viewable position on their cable network, so why should cable
operator be encouraged to spend more money to acquire legal content? Its true “Good Artist
Borrow” Great Artist Steals.
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Location: Karachi, Pakistan

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