Where Is The Money For Programming?

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How relevant is Prasar Bharati the broadcaster? That question is best answered by looking at where its money goes. Technology and manpower eat up all the money the government allocates for Prasar Bharati. There isn’t any left for programming. The Pitroda committee report puts out a simple statistic. In 2011-12, the operational cost of distributing Doordarshan’s signal was Rs.723 crore. Of this, 88% was spent on terrestrial distribution, which reached 8% of the audience. Only 7% of the cost went towards reaching the 53% of the audience in cable and satellite households. And only 6% went towards reaching the 37% in direct-to-home, or DTH, households. Here’s how the situation looks on the ground. There is a somewhat forlorn looking relay centre at Bhimavaram in Krishna district, which exemplifies DD’s terrestrial redundancy. It is a throwback to the days where all transmission was terrestrial and you had to switch manually between local, regional and national transmission. Today, this function has disappeared. “For the last 12 years, nobody is watching terrestrial TV here,” says the engineer in charge. But there is a staff of five, the monthly power bill is Rs.50,000, and Rs.15,000 rent is paid to the local municipality. The only thing missing is current relevance. There are 1,400 transmitters with similar facilities—land, uplink dishes, transmission towers, maintenance budgets. Meanwhile, the real service people need from the public broadcaster is a DTH or cable platform that charges little; digitization in urban and rural India has increased the cost of television viewing for low-income groups. Though cable digitization has not become mandatory in the rural areas yet, set-top boxes have entered even impoverished village homes making a minimum monthly subscription of Rs.200-plus mandatory. In urban areas of Delhi and Ahmedabad, a small segment of what constitutes the socio-economic category E viewers (the category comprises very low-income households) have actually gone off cable TV because of the unaffordability of the monthly subscription, in addition to the cost of the set- top box. The majority incurs the extra cost of digitized television, but has cut back on food and clothing expenditure. A household survey of six Delhi slums conducted in May actually shows this. So Doordarshan’s free dish is what is really relevant today provided it gives people the channels they want. In the seven to eight years that it has been around DD Direct established itself as a free DTH service, but was neither marketed widely nor subscribed to much because of the limitations of the bouquet it offered—some free-to-air private channels and a whole lot of Doordarshan channels. It had no encryption and no proprietary set-top box, you could buy any hardware, point your dish to the relevant satellite and get going. That also meant that the broadcaster had no way of knowing for sure how many subscribers it had. Now that is about to change. The realization has dawned that Prasar Bharati must respond to current reality and DTH is the main way forward. A conditional access system for DD Direct is being put in place. It will not cost the consumer anything more but will give DD an idea of the numbers once the connections require enabling through a call centre. Second, expansion of the DTH bouquet from the current 59 channels to 97 has been cleared and the augmentation of capacity is under way. DD charges a hefty carriage fee, and it remains to be seen how many takers there will be among private broadcasters for the augmented channel slots. Will the decision makers in this behemoth understand that unless it gets its bouquet right it will not crack the DTH market? Children control the remote in TV homes for some part of the day and want cartoons and channels such as Nat Geo and Discovery to be on the platform their parents subscribe to. DD Direct does not have those now. Meanwhile, there are other audience segments which cannot be catered to via DTH, which is pan Indian. One of the significant current shortfalls of public broadcasting is providing a service in languages which serve small communities. There is no incentive for private broadcasters to offer programming in very local languages followed by a limited population. But it is a keenly felt need. A large district like Kutch, located on the border, is not catered to at all by Doordarshan in Kutchi—no programme in Kutchi from Ahmedabad Doordarshan, none on the local transmission from Bhuj either. Nor is this need met by any private broadcaster, only by DVDs which the local folk buy or rent.

Read more at: Prasar Bharati: Where is the money for programming? - Livemint