Blackout: A family loses analogue signal. Picture by Jai Prakash

Amit Kumar missed much of the ICC Champions Trophy warm-up match between Pakistan and South Africa on Monday as his cable operator stopped beaming analogue signal for paid channels.

The match began at the Oval, London, at 3pm (IST). But the signal to both the TVs at Amit’s Anandpuri home went blank around 4pm, leaving him disgruntled. “Suddenly, the TV went blank,” he said.

Amit added: “Now, I shall have to spend around Rs 2,500 to install set-top boxes for my two TVs.”

He was not the only one experiencing the inconvenience. Around 1 lakh television sets in the city went blank on Monday as multi-system cable TV operator (MSO) SITI Maurya Cablenet Pvt. Ltd stopped beaming analogue signals.

Rajnish Dikshit, director, SITI Maurya Cablenet Pvt. Ltd, said: “We have around 1.5 lakh customers. Set-top boxes have been installed for 50,000 TVs. The analogue signals for the rest were stopped today (Monday).”

Explaining the reason for the sudden blackout, he said: “We received an email from the ministry of information and broadcasting last week that our licence would be cancelled if we continued beaming analogue signals. We held a meeting on Monday with cable operators and decided to block the analogue signals.”

The other MSO in Patna, Darsh Digital Network Pvt. Ltd, is also planning to phase out the analogue signal but waiting for a formal decision by the state government.

The public relations department, responsible for the the digitisation, has convened a meeting of cable operators on June 5. The first deadline for digitisation in Patna was March 31. Cable operators had sought an extension of 45 days. Additional district magistrate Arvind Kumar Tiwari, also the nodal officer for digitisation, had suggested to the government to fix May 30 as the deadline.