NEW DELHI: A total of 182 television channels have been asked by the Information and Broadcasting Ministry to provide by 8 June certain details required for monitoring purposes by the Electronic Media Monitoring Centre (EMMC).

The pay channels have to provide one set of Professionat TRO for each TV channel permitted to them which can give SD-SDI output (in case of HD channels, HD-SDI output) alongwith one spare IRD per bouquet to EMMC.

Alternately, the pay TV broadcaster/ service irovider should provide Viewing Card (VC) with matching CAlvl module for interfacing with demodulators to decrypt and demodulate the channels over IP. TV Channels are also required to provide the technical details as frequency, satellite, location of teleport, etc.

The Free-to-Air (FTA) TV channels whose signals are not encrypted need not provide such equipment. However, they may immediately inform of the frequency being used

The Information and Broadcasting Ministry said that under Clause 5.14 of Downlinking Guidelines, 'the applicant company shall provide the necessary monitoring facility at its own cost for monitoring of programmes or content by the representative of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting or any other Government agency as and when required'.

A list attached along with the notice published on the site of the Ministry mib.nic.in also gives a list of the 182 channels as well as the officers to whom the information has to be sent.

The list contains all genres of channels – news, general entertainment, business news, and music.