Prasar Bharati invites applications for Free Dish MPEG-2 slots in the 59th e-auction

India’s public broadcaster Prasar Bharati on Saturday invited applications for allotment of vacant MPEG-4 slots of DD Free Dish DTH platform for the period starting from 1st April 2022 to 31st March 2023.

Based on language and genre, TV channels have been categorised into six buckets namely- ‘R1’ for devotional, ‘A+’ for Hindi GEC, ‘A’ for Hindi Movies, ‘B’ for Hindi music, sports, teleshopping, Bhojpuri GEC & Bhojpuri movies, ‘C’ for Hindi, English, Punjabi news & current affairs channels and ‘D’ for other remaining languages and genres.

The starting reserve price in Bucket R1, Bucket A+, Bucket A, Bucket B, Bucket C, and Bucket D will be Rs 20 crore, Rs 15.45 crore, Rs 13.05 crore, Rs 11.10 crore, Rs 10.05 crore and Rs 7.05 crore respectively.

Bidding will be open only for satellite channels licensed by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting for downlinking in India along with international broadcasters permitted by the MIB. This e-auction will be conducted bucket-wise starting with the bucket having the highest reserve price i.e, ‘Bucket R1’, and will go down in descending order of reserve price. 

The allotment of available slots will be done through the 59th online E-Auction process which will be tentatively held on the afternoon of 23rd March  2022. Applications to participate in the auction can be submitted till 3 pm on 21st March 2022.