Mumbai: Public broadcaster Prasar Bharati has invited applications for allotment of vacant MPEG-2 slots of the DD Free Dish free direct-to-home (DTH) platform for the period 17 August 2022 to 31 March 2023. The 61st e-auction process will be tentatively held on 10 August.
The public broadcaster has categorized the vacant MPEG-2 slots under six buckets including Bucket A for all Hindi movie channels, Bucket R1 for devotional channels, Bucket A+ for all Hindi general entertainment (GEC) channels, Bucket B for all Hindi music channels, Hindi sports channels, Bhojpuri GECs, Bhojpuri movies and Hindi teleshopping channels, Bucket C for Hindi, English and Punjabi news and current affairs channels and Bucket D for remaining genre language channels.
The reserve price of the MPEG-2 slots is set as high as Rs 14.37 crore and as low as Rs 4.40 crore. Notably, the prices for Hindi movie channels and devotional channels are the highest while Hindi GECs and news and current affairs channels are low-priced in comparison.
Prasar Bharati recently concluded its 60th e-auction where it allotted two MPEG-4 slots to the channels Swaraj Express SMBC and Sanskriti 24x7 for the period 5 July 2022 to 31 March 2023.
In a recent interview, former Prasar Bharati CEO Shashi Shekhar Vempati revealed that the public broadcaster earned as much as ~Rs 750 crore from the sale of vacant DD Free Dish slots in 2021.
With an estimated reach of 50 million viewers, DD Free Dish is the largest DTH platform in the country. The platform has 167 TV channels including 145 channels in standard definition (SD) MPEG-2, 21 channels in SD MPEG-4 and one channel in high-definition (HD) MPEG-4. The public broadcaster intends to expand its overall number of channels to 200.
