ITV

Tag: NewsOnAir

  • DD channels reached over 680 million viewers in 2021: MIB

    DD channels reached over 680 million viewers in 2021: MIB

    Mumbai: Prasar Bharati, through its twin network of Doordarshan and All India Radio has reached millions of viewers in India and worldwide in 2021, according to a statement issued by the ministry of information and broadcasting (MIB) on Friday. Reaching more than 190 countries and 790 cities across the globe, Prasar Bharati’s NewsOnAir app clocked a listenership of over 214 million, it said.

    In the year gone by, DD channels across the country together clocked a viewership of more than six billion, reaching over 680 million viewers to deliver content in various regional languages and dialects.

    With audiences spanning across 190+ countries, more than 185 YouTube channels of Doordarshan and All India Radio together registered more than a billion views in 2021. Their watch time for the entire year was 94 million hours, said the statement.

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    Other than general entertainment and news, the public broadcaster also delivered on its mandate of ensuring that Covid-19 awareness messages, free consultation with doctors, and important government guidelines reach every person in the remotest corners of the country.

     

  • Throwback2020: DD’s importance stood out this year

    Throwback2020: DD’s importance stood out this year

    NEW DELHI: 2020 was a challenging year for public broadcasting. But it was also the year when public broadcasting made its presence felt and reminded people of the reason it exists. That the mission was fulfilled at the peak of the pandemic, when everything was paralyzed, but Doordarshan and All India Radio (AIR) continued their services uninterruptedly.

    Unfortunately, we lost some colleagues to the pandemic. Our reporters tested positive for the coronavirus while they were out in the field. So in that sense, public broadcasting went through the test of times.

    One key area where public broadcasting came through was in delivering social messages and creating awareness about the pandemic. Doordarshan emerged as the top five social advertisers, which underscores the value of public messages put out by us. We also saw record viewership ratings in the early days of the lockdown.

    Then, the tele-classes on Doordarshan ensured that the academic year did not go waste for students from far-flung areas. India is blessed with the only free to air satellite platform DD FreeDish, reaching thirty-five million plus households. With thirty plus Doordarshan channels and fifty-one educational channels, we have eighty-six channels delivering tele-classes across different languages.

    This year reminded us why people tune into Doordarshan. It remains the only platform where the entire family can come together and watch iconic content, no matter which region they belong to. This will be our focus going forward- to create selective iconic content that is not only a part of the heritage of the country but will appeal to the entire population and becomes a benchmark for the decades to come. Content like Mahabharata, Ramayana, Shaktimaan, which have a recall value that spans decades.

    But it’s not just content, but also a question of production values. People, especially youth, have high expectations. The benchmark is, what they call ‘over the top (OTT) quality,’ coupled with the latest use of technologies, graphics, and visual effects. We will try to ensure that the projects we work on bring in those elements.

    At the same time, we need to acknowledge that public broadcasters operate on public funds. There are constraints. So it cannot invest in the same manner that a private sector media house could do.

    NewsOnAir application proved to be a dramatic game-changer this year on the radio front, just like DD FreeDish proved to be a game-changer on the television front. It ensured that traditional radio listening is no longer restricted to the terrestrial reach of the transmitters. Now, it does not matter where you are, you can listen to your favourite channel. It has changed radio listening habits for audiences across the world.

    It also brought all radio services of AIR under one umbrella. Unlike TV where everything is uplinked in the satellite so you can monitor what is going on, with radio, it used to be restricted to that particular radius of a few kilometres. But, now we can tune into any of the radio stations among the 200 livestreams. It has also brought a degree of transparency and accountability.

    We also saw Doordarshan regional channels discovering life beyond the satellite way of traditional broadcasting. From our TV rating standpoint, they may be struggling with the private channels, because there are hundreds of channels, so it’s a huge challenge for a public broadcaster to stand out. However, on the digital side, each of these channels has acquired a distinct place. Several of them crossed half a billion subscriber base on YouTube, because of teleclasses being available on demand.

    I have a special mention for north-east Doordarshan because it saw dramatic growth in the news this year. The news was available in languages that were otherwise not available in Garo, Khasi, and Assamese. DD News Guwahati and DD News Shillong performed very well digitally as youth increasingly consumed content through the internet and smartphones.

    Apart from that, the most interesting thing has been the DD archives. In order to take full advantage of the nostalgia, we had started putting the archival content online, digitising it and making it available online. Old plays, old serials, old songs, all content will be made available. So it has driven renewed interest in regional languages.

    On the revenue side, the income was fairly steady, except for some disruptions, on the radio side. There were some hiccups for DD FreeDish too and some channels had to leave, but many new channels came on board, including three movie channels in the recent auction. Overall DD FreeDish remains on a steady path and a source of substantial revenue.

    On the advertising side, we definitely saw an uptick in commercial advertising because of the renewed interest in Mahabharata. But some of the biggest sporting events did not happen, so that was a disappointment. Hopefully, we will catch up in 2021.

    (Shashi Shekhar Vempati is the CEO of Prasar Bharati. This is an excerpt from a conversation he had with Srishti Choudhary)

  • Prasar Bharati on a Covid-19 awareness drive

    Prasar Bharati on a Covid-19 awareness drive

    MUMBAI: Public broadcaster Prasar Bharati is making all efforts to educate and inform its viewers regarding the Covid-19 pandemic by leveraging its vast network of broadcast, radio and digital services. The pubcaster operates the largest network of TV and radio with thousands of transmitters and hundreds of stations/channels/services spread across the country.

    DD News and DD India on TV, AIR on radio and Prasar Bharati News Service (PBNS) and NewsOnAir app on digital are playing lead roles in keeping the people informed.

    “Our first priority has been to ensure that authentic news and information is made available to the citizens. The pubcaster has put in tremendous energy and effort towards informing and educating the citizens regarding COVID-19,” says Prasar Bharati CEO Shashi Shekhar Vempati.

    Both DD news and AIR news have created a special COVID-19 bulletin twice a day in English and Hindi with designated slots. These bulletins have been made available digitally through a dedicated YouTube playlist for the benefit of private media. A dedicated channel has also been designated on DD FreeDish to continuously stream COVID-19 informational videos and news. The same is also available digitally via YouTube, informs Vempati.

    He says: “As a contingency plan, the national news streams on both TV and Radio have been made accessible to all the regional services as a fall-back mechanism so that no channel or station goes blank during the lockdown. Even vacant slots on DD Free Dish are continuously streaming COVID-19 information during this period.”

    The pubcaster is airing informational videos at high frequency on all TV channels and equivalent jingles on all radio services. A dedicated bi-lingual national news service has also been started by AIR News which is available on all FM, MW, DTH and web.

    Vempati says, “The greatest impact of the pubcaster is in regional services and local languages. Both TV and radio are innovating and using digital tools to keep the news and information going despite lockdown. Several of these regional efforts have been reported upon by media across the country. All of this is being curated and shared on social media from our main twitter handles apart from being aggregated in the NewsOnAir App.”

    The pubcaster’s global digital platform, NewsOnAir App, aggregates all of TV and radio content digitally. It is available on both Android and iOS. The app has more than 200 radio streams from across India. It has several audio-on-demand content; this includes hourly news bulletins in all Indian and several foreign languages to entertainment content, including historic shows of Vividh Bharati. NewsOnAir is a one-stop App for experiencing all of public broadcasting content.

    Vempati believes that the suspension in the production of original content is the time for innovation. “The entire industry has been impacted with the production coming to a halt. But we see this as a period for content innovation for new and unique formats and genres of content to emerge. Our radio teams are working on the same, leveraging remote communication tools to generate new content; as an example we had an early morning show of bird songs crowdsourced from across India. Also, in the pipeline are radio plays and book reading.”