Five lakh cable homes in Calcutta missed the Uefa Champions League final and even more might be denied the opportunity to watch the ICC Champions Trophy and then Wimbledon because of a stand-off between the MSOs and broadcasters over payments.

ESPN, STAR Cricket and STAR Sports are off air on the Manthan network and nobody is sure if they will be back before India take the field at Cardiff against South Africa on Thursday.

Siti Cable, which has 12 lakh subscribers in the city, and GTPL-KCBPL with 7 lakh are also under the scanner for allegedly missed payments, broadcaster ESPN-STAR Sports said. The four lakh-odd subscribers of Hathway weren’t getting ESPN, Star Sports and Star Cricket for some time but services were restored after an agreement with the MSO.

If the impasse doesn’t end, TV will also suffer a tennis elbow. The Champions Trophy ends on June 23 and Wimbledon starts the next day.

Amaresh Saha of Tallah Park, who works in Salt Lake’s Sector V, said he had made up his mind to shift to direct-to-home TV despite the higher cost. “I made a final call to my cable guy on Monday but he could not say when STAR Sports and STAR Cricket would be back. So I will take a DTH connection tomorrow. I don’t want to be caught off guard like this.”

DTH operators hope there will be a spurt in sales because of the cable fiasco. “You won’t find a channel going off air on Tata Sky,” said Vikram Mehra, chief commercial officer of Tata Sky.

The reason for the cable stand-off is the forced transparency about the number of subscribers post-digitisation.

“Broadcasters are now demanding money for every connection. But a large section of cable operators have stopped sharing revenue with us,” said Sudip Ghosh, director of Manthan. “We, in turn, are not being able to pay the broadcasters and that is why so many channels are going off air,” he added.

Cable operators alleged that the MSOs had never been serious about entering into a “mutually beneficial” revenue-sharing deal with them. “We have a lot of recurring costs. We have to employ technicians and other staff and pay them. We cannot agree to whatever an MSO dictates,” said the leader of a cable operators’ union.

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India suggests a 65:35 revenue-sharing model between the MSO and the local cable operators. But cable operators say this doesn’t cover their operating costs.

Industry experts feel the only way forward is to roll out channel packages. “When packages come in, a broadcaster would need to be paid for only the connections that subscribe to its service. There needs to be a base package and the niche sports channels can be made a la carte,” an official said.