Four weeks after it was introduced, a severe shortage of set top boxes for Conditional Access System (CAS) has provided an opportunity for direct-to-home (DTH) competitors to build market shares in Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata.

Preliminary industry numbers show that against a demand for 200,000 cable boxes in the three cities so far, operators have only been able to service a little over half the demand.

Waiting periods are also as long as ten days against 24-48 hours for DTH services, sources said.

These drawbacks have provided DTH operators like Tata Sky and Zee's Dish TV an opportunity to woo  cable homes to their services. The DTH operators have already seeded over 130,000 connections in the CAS-notified areas, which includes a total of of 2.2 million households.

Thus, of the 250,000 households that have opted either for CAS or DTH service, DTH operators currently have a larger market share.

In Delhi, there are 8 lakh CAS-notified households but the set top boxes for cable have been placed only in over 35,000-40,000 households. South Mumbai accounts for another 800,000-900,000 CAS homes with around 50,000 getting cable set top boxes industry sources said.

According to industry sources, between Tata Sky and Dish TV 3,000-3,500 DTH connections are being activated daily in the CAS areas of the three metros against 1,500-2,000 CAS connections. Overall, 8,000-9,000 DTH connections are being activated per day.

"We had anticipated this demand so there is no shortage of boxes," said Vikram Kaushik CEO of Tata Sky.

However, DTH operators are suffering a shortage of engineers for installation, which is causing some delays at the consumer's end. To get over the problem Tata Sky has hired over 1.000 engineers in Delhi and Mumbai this month.

However, some cable operators say that the shortage is self created as consumers took time to decide on buying a box. "All consumers who had decided to opt for CAS in the last week of December have received their digital set top box. We are importing these boxes and if someone opts for it today, we can only install it in a week to ten days," says Vickky Chaudhury, a south Delhi-based cable operator.

But multi system operators maintain that there is no shortage.

"Unlike DTH service providers, we are required to furnish details on set top boxes availability to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai). And we have seeded over 4 lakh boxes in the last five weeks with adequate stocks to meet any demands. So the problem is at the local cable operators' end," Ashok Mansukhani, MSO Alliance president and executive vice president of Hinduja TMT told Business Standard.