DD Free Dish sells five MPEG-2 slots for Rs 34-35 crore
The platform has added Showbox, Ishara TV, Sun Marathi, Naaptol, and Enterr10 Bangla
DD Free Dish, which has an estimated 40 million user base, has sold five MPEG-2 slots through 54th online e-auction process. The platform has added five new channels namely Showbox, Ishara TV, Sun Marathi, Naaptol, and Enterr10 Bangla.
The channels will be available on the platform from 16th August 2021 to 31st March 2022.
According to a source close to the development, Prasar Bharati has generated carriage fees worth Rs 34-35 crore from the auction of the five MPEG-2 slots. “The total collection from auction of five slots would be in the range of Rs 34 to 35 crore. The individual bids will not be very high from the reserve price of each genre since the bidding is not so fierce when slots are allotted on pro rata basis,” the source added.
Prasar Bharati had recently invited applications for allotment of vacant MPEG-2 slots of DD Free Dish through 54th online e-auction process. The pro rata reserve price for English, Hindi, and Punjabi news channels was Rs 13.84 crore. In the case of Hindi GEC and movie channels, the pro rata reserve price was Rs 10.35 crore and Rs 8.38 crore respectively.
For Music (Hindi) channels, Sports (Hindi) channels, GEC (Bhojpuri), Movies (Bhojpuri) and Teleshopping (Hindi) channels, the pro rata reserve price stood at Rs 7.21 crore. The public broadcaster had fixed pro rata reserve price of Rs 3.92 crore for all other remaining Genre (Language) Channels and Teleshopping (Regional) channels.
Two out of the three channels that won bids are from IN10 Media network. These include Hindi general entertainment channel, Ishara and Hindi music channel, ShowBox. Naaptol is a home-shopping channel, while Enterr10 Bangla is a Bengali GEC from the Enterr10 Television company.
Sun Marathi is the Marathi GEC from Sun TV Network. This will be the second regional GEC from the Sun TV Network stable outside South India after Sun Bangla. Sun TV Network has taken a DD Free Dish slot for the first time. Barring Sun Bangla and Sun Marathi, all the other channels of the network are pay. Sun TV Network owns and operates 25 SD and 8 HD channels.
Meanwhile, Prasar Bharati has invited applications to fill up vacant MPEG-4 slots of DD Free Dish on pro rata basis for the period from 01.09.2021 to 31.03.2022 through the 55th online e-auction process to be held on 23.08.2021.
At present, DD Free Dish has 161 TV channels out of which 20 TV channels are in MPEG-4 stream and remaining in MPEG-2. There are around 40 DD Channels, 70 Private channels and 51 educational channels.
