DD Direct Plus Loosing out in DTH Battle?

DD or Doordarshan, the national broadcaster started the first DTH service in India with a good bouquet of Private channels like the BBC, Aaj tak , Zee Smile etc along with the whole bunch of DD channels.

They started with lots of promises and promised better content and future increase in channels and pay tv with good programming using cam slots etc.

read DD India

They used the SES New Skies Satellite Nss6 – the Satellite being currently used by Zee s Dish Tv and planned to shift soon to a local Satellite to save forex. Finally they shifted to Insat 4B recently.

DD has its financial woes but worse they have their management woes with over staffing, political interference, poor content and questionable decisions like the telecast of almost dead channel Jain Tv just as fillers.

With competition comes tightening and betterment but it is quite the reverse with DD , which has steadily declined after entry of Zee Dishtv on NSS6 at 95*E and TATA Sky (BSkyBs Indian Avatar) on Insat 4A at 83.0°E and soon to come Reliance Bluemagic and Sun tv in south, Mtnl n other Iptv players and Reliance also fighting for a share of the Mkt.

The degradation stared with wasting public money on 2 channels Lok sabha n Rajya sabha which only broad casted for 6 hrs a day max..on insistence of the current Speaker Mr. Somnath Chatterjee .What is the trp of Lok Sabha n Rajya Sabha channel?

Worse the babus stopped Zee dish tv from telecasting the dd channels Free To Air on their Zenga boxes using legislation reducing the DD viewership as a result of the Cricket match broadcast controversy.

DD news which was overhauled when DTH was first launched, has gone back to its old avatar as a political mouthpiece giving dedicated airtime to Sonia Congress and Communists. Most of the better reporters have gone to Ndtv Cnn Ibn etc. (not that they are not political mouthpieces). The English news reading Bhabijis (like Sakal with below standards phonetic skills who cant even read most things without misreading or fumbling at least once, let alone compete with some of the better private broadcasters) are back. I still prefer a few remaining good Hindi DD anchors like Neelam Sharma, and the DD Sahyadri Batmya which has still maintained certain standards for local news .

First they replaced BBC news with DW tv (channel is nice but most content is Deutscheland centric and in German).Then Etv Marathi disappeared.

Now Zee Smile and ETC Punjabi are also off the DD dish network , as is Aaj tak Aakash Bangla and TV9 as confirmed by Lyngsat.

The steady migration of good private channels from DD Dth network comes as a deathblow on the future of DD DTH as a commercially viable entity, and reaffirmed it as a national broadcaster wasting public money on party propaganda and and valuable Ku band transponders of Insat 4B on poor programing and repeat dd channels.

What is the use of so much public investment when no one wants to see most DD channels ? Who will invest in a dish and stb costing close to Rs 2500 + installation for channels no one wants to see, mainly because most regional channels and DD1, DD News are broadcast using tv towers, Ok to be fair there’s still a few descent channels left like Aaj Tak and Ht* and Zee Music for the South u have plenty of channels like Sun tv and Sun tv news in tamil (ex Dmk mouthpiece), Jaya tv ( Jayalalitha mouthpiece), Kairali tv (a Malayali CPIM mouthpiece),TV9 Telugu? But is it worth it , when god knows how many of them will go pay in the near future once Sun dth is launched?

Looks like Prasar Bharatis DD Direct plus is just another grandiose national waste of taxpayer money as i don’t see things changing very soon.

For the list of private channels on DD try Private channels on DD and DD Reschuffle

For alternatives read my new post Dth War and Alternatives to DD

* Have moved out of DD