Mumbai: Public broadcaster Prasar Bharati has added five new MPEG-2 slots for its DD Free Dish DTH platform at the end of the 54th e-auction.

Hindi general entertainment channel (GEC) Ishara TV, teleshopping channel Naaptol, music channel Showbox, Marathi channel Sun Marathi, and Bengali channel Enterr10 Bangla have been successful in acquiring slots. The new channels will be on DD Free Dish platform from 16 August onwards.

The allotment period for the channels is from 16 August, 2021 to 31 March, 2022 and successful bidders will have to make payment in six monthly instalments, said Prasar Bharti.

The public service broadcaster had invited applications for the vacant slots on 31 July, which were only open to the satellite channels licensed by the ministry of information and broadcasting for downlinking in India. Only license holder companies or their authorised distributor partners could apply for allocation of DD Free Dish slots.

Applications for the e-auction were received under five different buckets in accordance with genres/language of channel and their starting reserve price for the allotment period.

The five buckets C, A+, A, B and D are classified as follows.

Bucket C – news and current affairs (Hindi), news and current affairs (English) and news and current affairs (Punjabi) channels.

Bucket A+ - All general entertainment (Hindi) channels.

Bucket A – All movie (Hindi) channels.

Bucket B – All music (Hindi), sports (Hindi), GEC (Bhojpuri), movies (Bhojpuri) and teleshopping (Hindi) channels.

Bucket D – All other remaining genres (language) and teleshopping (regional) channels.