Advanced Television

India’s Doordarshan sets new guidelines

January 17, 2019

By Chris Forrester

India’s public broadcaster, Prasar Bharati is restructuring its guidelines for the allocation and sale of broadcasting slots on its Doordarshan DTH ‘Free Dish’ platform. The system has an estimated 30 million viewing homes.

Doordarshan intends auctioning a batch of channel slots for transmission in MPEG-2, starting on February 11th.  This will be the 38th e-Auction handled by the broadcaster.

According to Television Post, the pubcaster will follow the e-auction mode of allocating slots to private satellite TV channels. As many as 56 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.

MPEG-4 slots will also be auctioned, and broadcasters will be obliged to pay different fees for their targeted genre of channel/s. For example, Hindi general entertainment channels will cost twice the fee of a Punjabi-language news service.

“Bidding in the e-auction will be conducted in multiple rounds starting with genres with highest Reserve Price and progressing in descending order of reserve price by genre (language) till all vacant unreserved MPEG2 slots are filled up,” says the local report.

Categories: Articles, Broadcast, DTH/Satellite