KARACHI, Nov 1: The Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority has supported piracy by not taking action against those cable operators who show pirated television channels illegally.

This was stated by the president of the Channel Providers Association of Pakistan (CPAP), Mahmud Rizvi, talking to newsmen at a press conference on Saturday.

He said: “The members of the CPAP are operating in an unhealthy competitive market in Pakistan. According to a recent study on copyright losses in Pakistan, conducted by Sidat Hyder Morshed Associated, for every 100 cable TV connections in Pakistan, about 94 per cent are pirated. The high level of piracy may be ascertained simply by the fact that for the estimated 2.6 million households in Pakistan that have cable TV connections, there are only 791 registered cable operators, most of whom are legally serving under 1,000 connections. One can safely assume that the remaining consumers are served by pirated cable operators.”

Speaking about the so-called “lead wallahs”, he said that these operators obtained cable feed from a legal cable operator with proper hardware facilities, acting as the head-end. He added that such “lead wallahs” formed a very large part of the cable TV industry and they remained outside the rules and regulations of the government.

Frikkie Jonker, the chief of the anti-piracy division of the Multi Choice Africa (MCA), a multi-channel television platform providing television entertainment to over 860,000 subscribers in about 50 countries on the African continent and adjacent islands, said his firm had signed a power of attorney with Royal IPR Services, authorizing it to take legal action against those cable operators who were using cards illegally and showing channels.

He said he had met Pemra officials in Islamabad and visited many establishments of cable operators (head-ends) who were illegally using MCA Smart cards in Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi. He also visited market places where these cards were easily available.

He explained that since MCA was not operating in Pakistan, use of its cards of showing of its channels, such as MNet, Movie Magic 1 and Movie Magic 2, was illegal. “The main sufferers of this piracy are the Pakistani channel providers who have legal licences of many important TV channels like Star channels, HBO, AXN, etc. These content rights holders are losing millions of rupees due to this type of piracy.