industry

Prasar Bharati forms new guidelines for DD Free Dish


MUMBAI: DD Free Dish, the free-to-air direct to home (DTH) service by the public broadcaster Prasar Bharati will soon conduct e-auctions for 54 vacant slots on the platform as it has finalised and notified the new policy after a wait of over one year.

As per the new policy, Prasar Bharati has divided channels into five buckets based on their genres and set the reserve price basis on which bucket the channels are from.

For instance, Hindi general entertainment channels and teleshopping channels will have a a reserve price of Rs 15 crore, while devotional and some regional genre channels will have reserve priceof just Rs 6 crore.

“In 2017, when we revised the policy, we thought of dividing genres into news and non-news channels. However, a realise that non-news category was too broad and this after consultations with stakeholders, we have decided to have 5 categories ranging from Rs 6-15 crore. This will also help us in providing far more variety of content and genres to our consumers,” Shashi Shekhar Vempati, CEO, Prasar Bharati told ET.

Under the new system, second bucket has been dedicated for Hindi movie channels with a reserve price of Rs 12 crore.

Hindi music, sports, and Bhojpuri GEC and movie will form part of third bucket with a reserve price of Rs 10 crore, while all the news channels in Hindi, English and Punjabi are under the fourth bucket, which has a reserve price of Rs 7 crore.

The last Bucket with a reserve price of Rs 6 crore will comprise of all other remaining genres/language channels.

With policy guidelines in place, Doordarshan will conduct the 38th online e-Auction for filling up of vacant MPEG-2 slots of DD Free Dish DTH Platform with effect from February 11.

A notice has already been issued inviting applications from eligible satellite TV channels for allotment of slots of DD Free Dish DTH Platform through 38th online e-auction process.

As many as 54 slots will be up for grabs after discounting the 26 slots reserved for DD/Lok Sabha/Rajya Sabha channels.

The DTH platform has 80 slots on its platform.

In its policy guideline document, the pubcaster has said that the reserve price has been determined on the basis of the commercial potential of the genre.

In the previous regime, the pubcaster had only two categories – news and non-news – while auctioning slots. The reserve price for news channels was Rs 6.5 crore while the same for non-news channels was Rs 8 crore.

DD Free Dish has an estimated 30 million customers.





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