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The Sam Pitroda committee report on Prasar Bharati, which came out last fortnight, is unequivocal on one point. If you continue with business as usual at India’s public service broadcaster, it will only hurtle further down the path to expensive irrelevance. When a new government comes in this summer, it will have to sooner or later decide how much good money it wants to continue wasting on this behemoth.
Here’s why. We are told that it is no secret that Prasar Bharati isn’t even faintly autonomous. The law that governs it needs to be overhauled. Change the law, take it out from under the government and put it under a parliamentary committee if it is worth continuing with this public service broadcaster. Make funding flow to it directly from Parliament.
Although far fewer people are watching it than ever before, it costs a bomb to maintain. “Doordarshan and AIR (All India Radio) have not been profitable since the inception of Prasar Bharati. In today’s competitive scenario they have got increasingly marginalized. Their programming has become less and less attractive to the audience leading to a downward spiral in viewership, advertiser confidence and revenue share,” the committee said in its report. “The once healthy TRPs (television rating points) now struggle to be greater than one.”
A public broadcaster is supposed to be viable, not profitable, It is not supposed to worry about TRPs.
But then, it has to have some other purpose. It does. It provides employment. Doordarshan has 33,800 employees, the highest in the world. BBC has 16,858, Japan and China 10,000 each. The rest much less.
As much as 44.4% of its employees are in engineering, 36.9% in administrative support services and only 18.7% in the core function of programming. “Or, about 11,000 staff are engaged in supporting the functioning of the remaining 20,000—roughly one support staff for every two staff members engaged on the programming or transmission work a ratio not likely to be found in any broadcasting organization,” the report said.
And then, because there are not enough programmers, it outsources content development to the extent of 80% in the case of Doordarshan, 20% in the case of All India Radio. And how much of its budget does it spend on content? A princely 13.3%. This compared with 75% of its budget for NHK (Japan’s public broadcaster), 71% for the BBC and ABC of Australia, and 66.7% for the Canadian public broadcaster. So then, is it winning audiences with its outsourced low-cost content? No, says the report. Terrestrial viewership in this country is down to 8%. As much as 92% of the country is now into satellite viewing mode, and in that universe Doordarshan struggles to get a TRP of one.
Digitization has done Doordarshan a favour over the last year; it has driven people back to it because poorer households cannot afford the extra costs of a set-top box for every TV in the house.
Prasar Bharati had accumulated losses of Rs.13,556 crore in 2011-12. “If we want no shortfall in a 5-year period, Prasar Bharati would have to almost double its revenues,” the Pitroda committee said.
How do you do that when you have shrinking viewership?
Prasar Bharati does not earn any licence fee, which is the source of funding for almost all international public service broadcasters. BBC earns 70% of its revenue from a licence fee. Prasar Bharati does not earn any subscription revenue, which accounts for 36% of revenue for all commercial TV channels in India today. Doordarshan currently has 8% of ad revenue share among TV channels. The bottomline looks something like this. Doordarshan is not autonomous, and it is not particularly watched. Nobody is watching its terrestrial transmission out of choice, those who cannot afford cable or satellite TV are, out of compulsion. Its satellite transmission is poorly watched. Its staffing costs accounts for most of its expenses.
The bulk of its staff are engineers who are increasingly redundant. Satellite transmission does not require hundreds of manned terrestrial transmitters. The rest of the staff are for programming when 80% of programming content is outsourced.
The Pitroda committee suggests that terrestrial transmission be jettisoned in favour of satellite transmission, which 92% of the country is on. Junk terrestrial, free up that spectrum and release it for commercial use. One straight recommendation should have been: any revenue accruing from resale of spectrum given up by Prasar Bharati should be put into a fund to create a corpus for its running.
This leaves us with the million dollar question: does India need public service programming? That is a no-brainer—it does.
In hundreds of villages and slums all over the country, the default public service broadcasters today are the Discovery, National Geographic and Animal Planet channels. The rural poor have shifted to satellite TV. Do those meet all their information needs? Of course not. But they make for quality viewing.
If Narendra Modi is going to be the next Big Chief as the polls maintain, he could begin by looking at the wasted opportunity Doordarshan has become. And he could begin in Gujarat where a labourer told me dryly last December in a Surat slum, “If you want to find out about Doordarshan, then you should go the rural areas. In the rural areas of Gujarat they watch it. They watch because there is no cable channel there.”
Prasar Bharati: The costly white elephant - Livemint
..
Here’s why. We are told that it is no secret that Prasar Bharati isn’t even faintly autonomous. The law that governs it needs to be overhauled. Change the law, take it out from under the government and put it under a parliamentary committee if it is worth continuing with this public service broadcaster. Make funding flow to it directly from Parliament.
Although far fewer people are watching it than ever before, it costs a bomb to maintain. “Doordarshan and AIR (All India Radio) have not been profitable since the inception of Prasar Bharati. In today’s competitive scenario they have got increasingly marginalized. Their programming has become less and less attractive to the audience leading to a downward spiral in viewership, advertiser confidence and revenue share,” the committee said in its report. “The once healthy TRPs (television rating points) now struggle to be greater than one.”
A public broadcaster is supposed to be viable, not profitable, It is not supposed to worry about TRPs.
But then, it has to have some other purpose. It does. It provides employment. Doordarshan has 33,800 employees, the highest in the world. BBC has 16,858, Japan and China 10,000 each. The rest much less.
As much as 44.4% of its employees are in engineering, 36.9% in administrative support services and only 18.7% in the core function of programming. “Or, about 11,000 staff are engaged in supporting the functioning of the remaining 20,000—roughly one support staff for every two staff members engaged on the programming or transmission work a ratio not likely to be found in any broadcasting organization,” the report said.
And then, because there are not enough programmers, it outsources content development to the extent of 80% in the case of Doordarshan, 20% in the case of All India Radio. And how much of its budget does it spend on content? A princely 13.3%. This compared with 75% of its budget for NHK (Japan’s public broadcaster), 71% for the BBC and ABC of Australia, and 66.7% for the Canadian public broadcaster. So then, is it winning audiences with its outsourced low-cost content? No, says the report. Terrestrial viewership in this country is down to 8%. As much as 92% of the country is now into satellite viewing mode, and in that universe Doordarshan struggles to get a TRP of one.
Digitization has done Doordarshan a favour over the last year; it has driven people back to it because poorer households cannot afford the extra costs of a set-top box for every TV in the house.
Prasar Bharati had accumulated losses of Rs.13,556 crore in 2011-12. “If we want no shortfall in a 5-year period, Prasar Bharati would have to almost double its revenues,” the Pitroda committee said.
How do you do that when you have shrinking viewership?
Prasar Bharati does not earn any licence fee, which is the source of funding for almost all international public service broadcasters. BBC earns 70% of its revenue from a licence fee. Prasar Bharati does not earn any subscription revenue, which accounts for 36% of revenue for all commercial TV channels in India today. Doordarshan currently has 8% of ad revenue share among TV channels. The bottomline looks something like this. Doordarshan is not autonomous, and it is not particularly watched. Nobody is watching its terrestrial transmission out of choice, those who cannot afford cable or satellite TV are, out of compulsion. Its satellite transmission is poorly watched. Its staffing costs accounts for most of its expenses.
The bulk of its staff are engineers who are increasingly redundant. Satellite transmission does not require hundreds of manned terrestrial transmitters. The rest of the staff are for programming when 80% of programming content is outsourced.
The Pitroda committee suggests that terrestrial transmission be jettisoned in favour of satellite transmission, which 92% of the country is on. Junk terrestrial, free up that spectrum and release it for commercial use. One straight recommendation should have been: any revenue accruing from resale of spectrum given up by Prasar Bharati should be put into a fund to create a corpus for its running.
This leaves us with the million dollar question: does India need public service programming? That is a no-brainer—it does.
In hundreds of villages and slums all over the country, the default public service broadcasters today are the Discovery, National Geographic and Animal Planet channels. The rural poor have shifted to satellite TV. Do those meet all their information needs? Of course not. But they make for quality viewing.
If Narendra Modi is going to be the next Big Chief as the polls maintain, he could begin by looking at the wasted opportunity Doordarshan has become. And he could begin in Gujarat where a labourer told me dryly last December in a Surat slum, “If you want to find out about Doordarshan, then you should go the rural areas. In the rural areas of Gujarat they watch it. They watch because there is no cable channel there.”
Prasar Bharati: The costly white elephant - Livemint
..
