MUMBAI: For long, Hathway Cable & Datacom old-timer Milind Karnik has been mandated with running the cable TV MSO’s secretarial operations as company secretary. Now he has been given a new role: as the head of commercial - all India and also the western India head. Karnik has been with Hathway since 1998 and he has resigned from his earlier position to take up the post, Hathway informed the BSE on 6 December. Replacing him is Ajay Singh, who has been appointed as company secretary and compliance officer.

Singh has an experience of 17 years. He has moved to Hathway from Real Networks India. Prior to this, Singh has worked with Drishtee Dot Com, Rangs Technologies and PACL India.

While Karnik was already handling the commercial business in the western region, in his new role, he will be handling the all India commercial business for Hathway.

“With digitisation, one needs to get the consumer billing and consumer application form in place for phase I and II respectively. This is a huge task. Also, in my new role, I will be working towards successfully completing phase III and phase IV of digitisation in western India,” informs Karnik, who plans to focus more on DAS phase III and IV now.

Karnik will work with Hathway subsidiaries including Hathway Bhawani and Hathway Rajesh as well. He will serve on the GTPL Hathway board.

Karnik will also handle commercial business in hotels which has a different tariff structure. “Hotels are still not digitised and so I will be concentrating on that as well.  We need to explain to the 3-Star and 5-Star properties where room base is 50 and above that digital feed is better than analogue,” he says.

“In the case of hotels, we also aim to focus on pay per view, which is a niche segment. That apart, I will be dealing with internet bandwidth in the commercial segment,” he concludes.