As per the Trai's chairman RS Sharma, TV viewers in the country will be able to switch over the service providers or their DTH connection, even without changing their set-top box by the end of this year. He hails the view of the interoperability and deems it be considered at rather the product planning stage itself. "Since last two years, we have been trying to make STBs interoperable. Large part of problem has been resolved. There are some business challenges (which) remain... we are looking at this to happen by end of this year," Sharma told reporters.

"Open systems are going to be the future. Entire back-end of Aadhaar has been developed on open source software except biometric de-duplication system," Sharma said.

The service of DTH is being compared to that of mobile telephony, where an individual is not mandated to buy a new phone as and when he wishes to change the telecom subscriber. "Many apps/services are being accessed primarily on smartphones now. Prevalence of the Open OS has also facilitated smartphones supporting multi-lingual capabilities and also led to the enhancement of the Skill India programme by the government," ICEA chairman Pankaj Mohindroo said.

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