Doordarshan: Europe and West Asia ahoy!

Doordarshan will now be available on the direct-to-home (DTH) platform in the Free-to-Air (FTA) basic pack in the whole of Europe and Arab countries.

Prasar Bharti and Deutsche Welle (DW), Germany's public service broadcaster have signed an MoU for distribution of Doordarshan's (DD) overseas 'India Channel' on Hotbird-13B.

Hotbird-13B is the most chosen satellite by European countries because of its polarity. It has a reach of 120 million homes in the whole of Europe, Northern Africa and the Middle East. The DTH platform has a total number of 1,543 TV channels of which 1,117 TV channels are Free-to-Air. The number of English channels available on this satellite are 124, prominent amongst which are BBC, CNN, CCTV, RT, France24, VOA TV, Euromans, Sky News, Bloomberg TV and Al Jazeera.

Doordarshan will now be available on the DTH platform in the Free-to-Air (FTA) basic pack in the whole of Europe and Arab countries. The DW offer comes with extremely favourable terms and DD-India does not even require a licence immediately as this can be obtained within one year, if the experiment is successful. DD will be offered in the basic package of the DTH service, which does not require any individual to either subscribe to it or to pay for viewing the channel.

A dedicated team from DD is working out details of the target market to decide on the content strategy, keeping in mind cultural and other sensitivities in countries that would receive DD's transmission.