Six news channels – News18 India, ABP News, NDTV India, Republic Bharat, Zee News and TV9 Bharatvarsh – have collectively spent Rs 100 crore to secure slots on the DD Free Dish platform, in accordance to folks conversant in the e-auction course of.
This is twice the quantity they spent in earlier 12 months’s e-auction. The value for slots within the present public sale has risen 50-100% for the six news channels.
News channels have paid Rs 16.68 crore on common for every slot, in contrast to Rs 9 crore final 12 months. The reserve value for news channels was set at Rs 7 crore.
Senior executives of main TV news networks mentioned the remaining news channels that haven’t bid to this point haven’t any choice however to bid for the slots for the reason that trade’s name to sit out the e-auction has turn into infructuous.
The news broadcasters had been earlier threatening to boycott the continued auctions, contending that the carriage charge for the following monetary 12 months would turn into unviable for the news style.
Prasar Bharati has modified the e-auction methodology by permitting channels from different genres to bid for slots in a specific bucket that was earlier reserved for a particular style.The news channels worry that the change in methodology will lead to large inflation within the worth of DD Free Dish slots.
The News Broadcasters and Digital Association (NBDA) and News Broadcasters Federation (NBF) had written a letter to info and broadcasting minister Anurag Thakur in search of his intervention within the matter. However, some member channels of each associations went forward and took part within the e-auction regardless of a boycott name given by the NBDA and NBF.
Prasar Bharati’s collections from the sale of vacant DD Free Dish slots have crossed Rs 450 crore on the fourth day of the annual e-auction, which kicked off on March 14, mentioned folks privy to the event.
The public broadcaster is conducting its annual e-auction for promoting vacant slots on DD Free Dish, which reaches an estimated 40-50 million houses. The slots are being auctioned for a one-year interval from April 1, 2023, to March 31, 2024.