The Mumbai-based Telenext Convergence (India) Private Limited will soon launch India's first indigenously designed and manufactured digital set-top boxes to enable the conditional access system. 

The price of the first `made-in-India' STB is expected to be in the region of Rs 3,500 per piece. Telenext director Deepak Khanolkar said only the first one lakh STBs would be priced at Rs 3,500 each. 

"For a volume of 300,000 pieces, the prices could come down to Rs 3,000 a piece," he said. He estimates the demand for STBs in the four metros to be in the region of 3.5 million units.

"Though there are estimated 7 million households (as declared by cable operators) with cable TV connections, we expect only 50 per cent of these to go for STBs within six weeks from July 15," he said.

In Kolkata, there are already signs of a strong preference for analogue STBs. Demand for digital STBs, hence, would be mainly in Mumbai, Delhi and Chennai. 

Analogue STBs are nearly 35 to 40 per cent cheaper than digital STBs. Khanolkar said that as demand picks up, the prices of digital STBs could slide to as low as Rs.2600 per piece. 

Telenext's STBs come with a one-year replacement warranty and three-year service warranty. 

Telenext's assembly line in Bangalore, he said, could meet the demand for the four metros.

"Though we can meet the entire demand for the four metros, we are targeting to capture 10 per cent of the market by December 2003." 

Telenext's assembly line is built at a cost of Rs 14 crore (Rs 140 million). "In the last couple of years we would have spent close to Rs 9 crore (Rs 90 million) on the R&D alone," he said.

Telenext proposes to market the STBs without the aid of third party retail outlets. "We are already in talks with some of the leading logistic companies in the country, through whom we propose to deliver the STBs," Khanolkar said.