India’s public broadcaster Prasar Bharati has called off a process, announced earlier, to acquire  ready-made TV content for Doordarshan.

“Prasar Bharati…called for submission of proposals for acquisition of off the shelf, that is readymade content. The process has now been called off due to technical reasons,” it said in a recent communication.

Prasar Bharati, parent of DD and All India Radio, without handing out more details about aborting the process, added that the processing fee of the applicants would be refunded.

Earlier in January, the public broadcaster had invited applications for acquisition of readymade TV content with target audience as children and young adults (up to the age of 18) in certain languages.

Content rights holders were asked to register themselves on the content acquisition portal to make submissions. The applied content must not have been aired, either fully or partly, from any FTA distribution platform (like DD Free Dish) in India through terrestrial, cable or DTH mode during the previous three calendar years.

The content was also supposed to have been offered for a half an hour or one hour slot for a license period of one year or three year or on perpetual basis for multiple telecasts on multiple channels of Doordarshan.