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June 19, 2001
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Money > Business Headlines > Report June 19, 2001 |
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No takers for DD Metro prime time slotsBS ICE Bureau Prasar Bharati's attempt to rake in the moolah by calling fresh bids for the prime time slot on DD Metro has come a cropper. None of the private channels bid for the 7-10 pm slot and DD received only one bid for the 11 pm-12.30 am slot from Ramesh Sharma's Moving Pictures. The deadline for submitting the bids ended Monday. According to a senior DD official, "It is very surprising that there have been no bids for the prime time slots. A decision on inviting fresh bids will be taken in a day or two." The contract of Nine Networks, currently supplying and marketing programmes on DD Metro between 7-10 pm under Nine Gold brand name, gets over later this year. In a statement Monday night, the HFCL-Nine Broadcasting said given the "unrealistic" terms and conditions proposed by DD, the bid for prime time on DD Metro looked commercially unviable. It also said HFCL-Nine would be happy to initiate fresh talks with DD on the terms and conditions suggested by it. Pritish Nandy Communications chief Pritish Nandy said the terms and conditions did not make it a viable proposition. The move to auction prime time slots had come in for criticism from various media organisations which were of the view that the public broadcaster's policy should not be profit maximisation and that inviting private channels would be at the cost of viewership of Doordarshan. The Prasar Bharati had last month invited bids for the prime-time band of 7 to 10 pm and for the 10 pm to 12.30 am slot on DD Metro for a period of three years. Dividing the time band into one-hour slots, it laid the floor price of Rs 225 million, Rs 325 million, Rs 425 million and Rs 175 million for the four hourly slots between 7 pm to 11pm. Under the general instructions released while inviting bids, Prasar Bharati had said programmes in Hindi will be telecast between 7 to 10 pm and thereafter it would be optional with English till 12.30 am. Some of the concerns of the big media companies revolved round high floor price(s) for various slots and the fact that original programming had to be supplied to DD, coupled with the stringent programming code of Prasar Bharati. Nine Networks few months back had petitioned DD to extend their Rs 1.21 billion one-year contract and give it some additional sops like flexibility in programming and more commercial time to be hawked to advertisers. DD while agreeing to an extension between 6-18 months had put its foot down on the other demands. Powered by YOU MAY ALSO WANT TO READ:
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