India’s public broadcaster Prasar Bharati has effected some changes in the auction methodology for slots on Doordarshan FreeDish, which is a subscription free DTH service.

The changes, effective immediately, were unveiled after a meeting at Prasar Bharati earlier this month and are aimed at, amongst other things, ensuring private satellite channels that join the FreeDish platform stick to the stated genre of content.

One of the changes brought in state, for example, that private sector broadcasters desirous of placing their TV channels on FreeDish shall be required to declare the genre and language of their channel while applying for e-auction.

“Such declaration for genre and language classification should be in accordance to the current norms… (and) the channel shall contain content predominantly of genre and language as declared at the time of e-auction application,” Prasar Bharati said on its website.

It has explained that ‘predominantly’ should mean 75 percent of content telecast on the channel shall be in genre and language (audio) as declared by an applicant channel provider in the beginning. This percentage excludes the limit of advertisements/promos on the channel as allowed under the government rules enshrined in the Cable Television Networks (Regulation) Act, 1995.

“This means that the content of declared genre and language of a channel shall not be less than 60 percent of the entire content of the channel in a month,” the pubcaster has clarified.

To bring in for inclusiveness, the amended auction rules say that Urdu language channels too have been included in buckets of genres where only Hindi language was mentioned. So, for instance, Bucket A+ now states ‘GEC (Hindi/Urdu) Channels’.

Example of Mid-Year e-Auction: For the purpose of illustration, Prasar Bharati has said, in an annual e-auction of MPEG-2 slots for example, highest bids received in different buckets, irrespective of the genre and language of channel, which bid highest in a bucket, are as below:

Then, mention of All India Radio (AIR) has been replaced with Akashvani, a nomenclature that has now been officially adopted, though both AIR and Akashvani were in use till now in auction papers and audio/video channel lineup on FreeDish.

The details of the changes in the FreeDish auction process, brought in by Prasar Bharati, could be read here: https://prasarbharati.gov.in/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Amendment-1-dated-13-12-2023.pdf .