📺 Our DTH bill keeps changing and nobody can explain why

I live in Dubai, but I pay the DTH bill for my parents' flat in Hyderabad every month. It's the same connection for almost 5 years, and the bill used to be steady, plus or minus a rupee. In the last 3 or 4 months it has started jumping around, once by about 40 rupees. The app and the SMS receipt show a total but give no reason for the change. I called customer care twice. The first person said it was a regulatory pass through charge. He said it gets added on top of the pack and I should have known from the start. The second person told me one of my channels moved to a different tier, so the price changed. Nobody had informed me about it before the bill came, and the two answers didn't match. The money isn't the problem. 40 rupees is nothing. What bothers me is that I can't see a clean breakdown. In the app you can find a rough split after opening 3 or 4 menus, and it looks different every month. So now I check the bill the way I check a restaurant bill, line by line, and it's tiring. My mother says to just pay it and forget, but I can't do that. A neighbour of my parents switched to streaming apps and stopped her DTH completely. She says 2 or 3 subscriptions cost her less, and she knows exactly what she's paying for. I'm tempted, though my father watches the news channels all day and he might complain. Is anyone else seeing this? Has anyone moved to streaming and stayed happy with it after a few months?

To me the bigger problem is that you're simply expected to trust the final number. There's no easy way to check it yourself, unless you spend half an evening on the app.

The app showing a different breakdown in every menu would put me off completely. Either it's badly made, or nobody there ever tried to find their own bill. I take a screenshot of my bill each month now, just so I can compare later. It's a small habit, but it showed me my own pack had changed twice without any message.

DTH still wins for me when it comes to live matches and a few news channels. Streaming lagged right at the last over of a close match, and I never forgave it. That's why I kept the connection even though the bill confuses me too. You could keep a very small DTH pack just for that, and drop everything else you don't watch.

I've read somewhere that DTH charges follow some official rules, but I don't know the details. Maybe look up the general structure online first, so you know what is normal and what isn't. Then when you call customer care again, you can ask them which charge is which. I did that for my internet bill and the person on the phone sounded more careful.

Switched to a mix of streaming subscriptions myself about eight months ago, and while the total monthly cost ended up being roughly similar to what the DTH bill had crept up to eventually, the actual predictability of it made a real, noticeable difference for me personally.

Two calls, two answers. That alone tells me the people on the phone don't know the reason. When I phoned my own provider about a bill last year, they also gave me 2 stories. I started writing down the name of the person and the time of every call. It's boring, but when they contradict each other you have something to show.

A regulatory pass through charge sounds like a phrase that makes an extra cost feel unavoidable. I asked my provider the same question once and got a different name for the same line.